Purpose: This paper focusses on the leaders' ability to recognise and empathise with emotions. This is important because leadership and particularly transformational leadership are principally focussed on an individual's social interactions and their ability to identify emotions and to react empathetically to the emotions of others (Psychogios and…

Working memory performance in individuals with autism is a matter of debate in the literature. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of stimuli in the working memory of children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Sixteen children with ASD, clinically diagnosed as high functioning, were matched for gender and age and…

Autistic children have difficulties in adapting their language for particular listeners and contexts. We asked whether these difficulties are more prominent when children are required to be cognitively flexible, when changing how they have previously referred to a particular object. We compared autistic (N = 30) with neuro-typical 5- to…

Teaching tact and intraverbal responses based on function-feature-class to children with language delays can result in the emergence of untrained relational responses. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of compound stimuli in discriminated operants (i.e., different combinations of hear, see, touch, and taste) on the acquisition…

Difficulties in processing emotional facial expressions is considered a central characteristic of children with autism spectrum condition (ASC). In addition, there is a growing interest in the use of virtual avatars capable of expressing emotions as an intervention aimed at improving the social skills of these individuals. One potential use of…

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference…

Adults use both bottom-up sensory inputs and top-down signals to generate predictions about future sensory inputs. Infants have also been shown to make predictions with simple stimuli and recent work has suggested top-down processing is available early in infancy. However, it is unknown whether this indicates that top-down prediction is an ability…

Children show a bias toward information about shape when labeling or determining category membership for novel objects. The body of work with human children suggests that the shape bias is not restricted to linguistic contexts but is highly contingent on task demands. Testing nonhumans could provide additional information about the salience of…

How do we form mental links between related items? Forming associations between representations is a key feature of episodic memory and provides the foundation for learning and guiding behavior. Theories suggest that spatial context plays a supportive role in episodic memory, providing a scaffold on which to form associations, but this has mostly…

According to several computational models, novel items can create a learning mode with dynamics favorable to new learning, and not to memory retrieval. In line with that idea, a new item in a recognition test has been found to create a bias toward calling subsequent items new as well. Here, we tested whether this bias, which we termed the…

Purpose: Previous evidence supports benefits of bilateral hearing aids, relative to unilateral hearing aid use, in laboratory environments using audio-only (AO) stimuli and relatively simple tasks. The purpose of this study was to evaluate bilateral hearing aid benefits in ecologically relevant laboratory settings, with and without visual cues. In…

Veg Out! is an infomercial-style produce awareness session. We use image-focused rather than content-focused slides to highlight the health benefits associated with produce consumption. This image-focused approach is helping participants become more familiar with produce serving sizes and increasing the likelihood of their consuming more produce.…

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature--specifically, a creature's head--by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are…

Introduction: Hookah smoking is becoming increasingly popular worldwide, especially among young adults. The growth of social media has also enabled sharing of opinions, experiences, and marketing related to hookah via user-generated content. Aim: To evaluate the portrayal and promotion of hookah on Instagram and to highlight public health…

Previous researchers have taught sighted adults to match braille sample stimuli to print comparisons in a matching-to-sample (MTS) format and assessed the emergence of other braille repertoires, such as transcribing and reading braille following this training. Although participants learned to match to sample with braille, they displayed limited…