The capacity to remember sequences is critical to many behaviors, such as navigation and communication. Adult humans readily recall the serial order of auditory items, and this ability is commonly understood to support, in part, the speech processing for language comprehension. Theories of short-term serial recall posit either use of absolute…

These two studies assessed adapted orientation technology for promoting correct direction and room identification during indoor traveling by persons with multiple (e.g., sensory, motor and intellectual/adaptive) disabilities. In Study I, two adults were included who had severe visual impairment or total blindness and deafness and used a wheelchair…

Temporal preparation and impulsivity involve overlapping neural structures (prefrontal cortex) and cognitive functions (response inhibition and time perception), however, their interrelations had not been investigated. We studied such interrelations by comparing the performance of groups with low vs. high non-clinical trait impulsivity during a…

Dyslexia is characterized by a core phonological deficit, although recent studies indicate that semantic impairment also contributes to this condition. In this study, event-related potentials (ERP) were used to examine whether the N400 wave in dyslexic children is modulated by phonological or semantic priming, similarly to age-matched controls.…

CD-ROM storybooks, often referred to as electronic texts, e-books, and interactive stories, are learning tools with supplemental features such as automatic reading of text, sound effects, word pronunciations, and graphic animations which support the development of reading skills and comprehension in beginning readers. Some CD-ROM storybooks also…

Researchers of metacognitive development in adulthood have exclusively used extreme-age-groups designs. We used a full cross-sectional sample (N = 285, age range: 18-80) to evaluate how associative relatedness and encoding strategies influence judgments of learning (JOLs) in adulthood. Participants studied related and unrelated word pairs and made…

Perruchet, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (2006) reported a striking dissociation between trends in the conscious expectancy of an event and the speed of a response that is cued by that event. They argued that this indicates the operation of independent processes in human associative learning. However, there remains a strong possibility that this…

The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness of consultation alone and consultation plus feedback on the proper use of positive behavior support strategies (PBS) on behaviors of three mothers with children with developmental disabilities. Results indicated that consultation plus feedback was more effective than consultation alone…

In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether and how a comma influences the reading of Chinese sentences comprised of different types of syntactic constituent such as word, phrase and clause. Participants read Chinese sentences that did or did not insert a comma at the end of a syntactic constituent. The results showed that the fixation…

Intercellular signaling is vital to communication within neuronal circuits. The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), the master circadian clock of mammals, contains a dense collection of neurons that align their intrinsic rhythmicity with environmental stimulus and physiological state. While peptide physiology has been demonstrated as a contributor to…

We examined priming of adjective-noun structures in Dutch hearing and deaf children. In three experiments, hearing 7- and 8-year-olds, hearing 11- and 12-year-olds, and deaf 11- and 12-year-olds read a prenominal structure (e.g., "the blue ball"), a relative clause structure (e.g., "the ball that is blue"), or a main clause…

We investigated orienting of attention by social and symbolic cues presented inside/outside the locus of attention. Participants responded to laterally presented targets preceded by simultaneously presented gaze and arrow cues. Participants' attention was allocated to either of the cues and the other cue served as a distractor. In Experiments 1-4…

Three experiments examined the vigilance performance of participants watching videos depicting intentional actions of an individual's hand reaching for and grasping an object--involving transporting or using either a gun or a hairdryer--in order to detect infrequent threat-related actions. Participants indicated detection of target actions either…

The electrophysiological response to words during the "N400" time window (approximately 300-500 ms post-onset) is affected by the context in which the word is presented, but whether this effect reflects the impact of context on "access" of the stored lexical information itself or, alternatively, post-access "integration" processes is still an open…

Goal-directed behavior requires cognitive control to effect online adjustments in response to ongoing processing demands. How signaling for these adjustments occurs has been a question of much interest. A basic question regarding the architecture of the cognitive control system is whether such signaling for control is specific to task context or…