Similar manifestations of functional decline in ageing and Alzheimer's disease obscure differences in the underlying cognitive mechanisms of impairment. We sought to examine the contributions of top-down attentional and bottom-up perceptual factors to visual self-movement processing in ageing and Alzheimer's disease. We administered a novel…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of a six-week intervention that aimed to promote teachers' physical activity level during working hours. Thirty-eight teachers from three intervention schools (schools randomly assigned as intervention group) received intervention prompts: SMS messages, leaflets and posters…

In three experiments native speakers of Czech translated bare nouns and gender-marked adjective + noun phrases into German, their second language (L2). In Experiments 1-3 we explored the so-called gender interference effect from first language (L1) as observed in previous picture naming studies (naming latencies were longer when the L1 noun and…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder often described as being characterized by a dissociative cognitive architecture, in which profound impairments of visuo-spatial cognition contrast with relative preservation of linguistic, face recognition and auditory short-memory abilities. This asymmetric and dissociative cognition…

Reinforcement-based interventions, the most frequently used treatments for school-age children, rely on accurately identifying stimuli that will serve to reinforce appropriate classroom behavior. Research has consistently demonstrated that the results from a forced-choice pairing procedure are the best predictors of reinforcing stimuli.…

Person-Environment (P-E) fit models provide a conceptually powerful way to think about career development, vocational choice, and occupational success. The work reported here focuses on yet another pair of P-E criteria: self-reported individual capacity for information processing (the ability to tolerate information overload from a variety of…

Recent theoretical developments in the field of absolute identification have stressed differences between relative and absolute processes, that is, whether stimulus magnitudes are judged relative to a shorter term context provided by recently presented stimuli or a longer term context provided by the entire set of stimuli. The authors developed a…

Tangible computing combines digital feedback with physical interactions - an important link for young children. Through the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, a real-world object (i.e. a chair) or a symbolic toy (i.e. a stuffed bear) can be tagged so that students can activate multimedia learning modules automatically. The…

This article presents the authors' reply to Rod Ellis's comments on their study on motivated classroom behavior. As Ellis correctly summarizes, the three student variables selected for investigation in the authors' study were attention, participation, and volunteering for teacher-fronted activity. These three components were then summed up in a…

A total of 90 fifth- and sixth-grade students studied a map of the fictitious island while twice listening to a 1,100-word prose passage describing it. The description included 16 nouns that had been chosen as map features. Map features were identified by labels and icons. Afterwards, students were given a cued recall test with 16 feature-related…

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of the animation of visual information when used in conjunction with text and static visuals in microcomputer-based instruction. Of particular interest were consequent performance on higher level learning tasks as a result of viewing these forms of visual presentation, and those levels of…

An interview protocol was devised to determine whether demands on working memory are reduced by the use of drawn or telegraphic formats. Students were chosen because some aspect of their group testing on presentation formats was provocative (e.g. high spatial score, but low reading comprehension score; high drawn score and low verbal score, etc.).…

A study examined the effects of visual-verbal redundancy and recaps on learning from television news. Two factors were used: redundancy between the visual and audio channels, and the presence or absence of a recap. Manipulation of these factors created four conditions: (1) redundant pictures and words plus recap, (2) redundant pictures and words…

Designed for professionals who design and develop instructional materials, this paper identifies specific and general strategies that educational technologists can employ in their media productions to enhance aesthetic awareness. A brief overview of aesthetics and aesthetic education is provided, including definitions and various approaches to…

This study investigated the effects of distractors on children's task-relevant (central) and task-irrelevant (incidental) recall on a short term visual memory task involving pictures of familiar animals and household articles. The effect of mode of distractor (auditory or visual) and the effect of developmental level were also studied. Subjects…