The research reported on here elaborated on the effects that images displayed on the walls have in schools as a variable in evaluating the educational quality. Mixed methods were used to analyse the images displayed on the walls of 27 classrooms to determine their provenance and authorship. The results show quantitative, qualitative and…

Visual input enhancement (VIE) increases the salience of grammatical forms, potentially facilitating acquisition through attention mechanisms. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language containing four linguistic cues (verb agreement, case marking, animacy, word order), with morphological cues either unmarked, marked in the…

We investigated the mechanisms underlying sandwich priming, a procedure in which a brief preprime target presentation precedes the conventional mask-prime-target sequence, used to study orthographic similarity. Lupker and Davis (2009) showed the sandwich paradigm enhances orthographic priming effects: With primes moderately related to targets,…

In prospective memory (PM) research, costs (slowed responding to the ongoing task when a PM task is present relative to when it is not) have typically been interpreted as implicating an attentionally demanding monitoring process. To inform this interpretation, Heathcote, Loft, and Remington (2015), using an accumulator model, found that PM-related…

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique that could be uniquely effective for investigating cortical function in human infants. However, prior efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of aligning arrays of fNIRS optodes placed on the scalp to anatomical or functional regions of underlying cortex.…

Previous research has found that different presentations of the same concept can result in different patterns of transfer to isomorphic instances of that concept. Much of this work has framed these effects in terms of advantages and disadvantages of concreteness or abstractness. We note that mathematics is a richly structured field, with deeply…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by early onset qualitative impairments in reciprocal social development. However, whether individuals with ASD exhibit impaired recognition of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions is debatable. To investigate subtle deficits in facial emotion recognition, we asked 14 children…

Early facial emotion recognition is hypothesized to be critical to later social functioning. However, relatively little is known about the typical intensity thresholds for recognizing facial emotions in preschoolers, between 2 and 4 years of age. This study employed a behavioral sorting task to examine the recognition of happy, fearful, and angry…

Spatial language is often used metaphorically to describe other domains, including time (long sound) and pitch (high sound). How does experience with these metaphors shape the ability to associate space with other domains? Here, we tested 3- to 6-year-old English-speaking children and adults with a cross-domain matching task. We probed…

We examined how visual feedback from electronic tuners affected trombonists' pitch performance and tuning confidence. High school (n = 29) and college trombonists (n = 30) were tasked to play in tune with a stimulus tone (G3) recorded by a professional trombonist presented through headphones. Following each of three attempts, participants rated…

Visual Impairments (VIs) are ranked as the fourth most common disability in the United States and are viewed as the most common restricting condition during childhood. It has been reported that 17% to 25% of school-aged children have some degree of a vision problem, thus interrupting their potential to reach optimal growth and learning in school.…

We estimate the difference in the chance of giving a socially undesirable response, one that violates social norms, by administration mode (online or in person) for a self-administered questionnaire (SAQ). We do this by evaluating open-ended responses to a photographic stimulus designed to generate undesirable responses. We test five variables:…

This study investigated the effect of font style and character spacing on reading performance of 25 second graders, measured by an oral reading fluency test. The effect of font type and character spacing on reading performance was analyzed with ANOVA. Font style did affect reading performance. Character spacing may be relevant for longer reading…

Studies using hierarchical patterns to test global precedence and local-global interference in individuals with ASD have produced mixed results. The current study focused on stimulus variability and locational uncertainty, while using different attentional modes. Two groups of 44 children with and without ASD completed a divided attention task as…

Uncovering inexpensive, simple techniques to encourage students to act in a pro-environmental manner is of critical importance. Through a four-week field study at a large, environmentally focused elementary school, it was found that placing negatively valenced emoticons (i.e., red frowny faces) on trash cans increased the proportion of recycled…