The current study investigated the efficacy of a self-managed activity schedule to teach 2 participants how to effectively order food items from a local community bakery. 2 participants who were on the autism spectrum were taught to follow a task analysis that was displayed on an iPhone. We used a multiple baseline design across participants to…

Adults reason by exclusivity to identify the meanings of novel words. However, it is debated whether, like children, they extend this strategy to disambiguate other referential expressions (e.g., facts about objects). To further inform this debate, this study tested 41 adults on four conditions of a disambiguation task: label/label, fact/fact,…

Although action experience has been shown to enhance the development of spatial cognition, the mechanism underlying the effects of action is still unclear. The present research examined the role of visual cues generated during action in promoting infants' mental rotation. We sought to clarify the underlying mechanism by decoupling different…

Americans produce approximately 250 million tons of trash every year, and almost 35 percent of those are of recyclable materials. There are over 1,200 landfills in the United States, and many have caused and will potentially cause significant damage to the environment. It is important for the next generation to know that what is perceived as…

Receptive identification is usually taught in matching-to-sample format, which entails the presentation of an auditory sample stimulus and several visual comparison stimuli in each trial. Conflicting recommendations exist regarding the order of stimulus presentation in matching-to-sample trials. The purpose of this study was to compare acquisition…

The language-based analogical reasoning abilities of Deaf children are a controversial topic. Researchers lack agreement about whether Deaf children possess the ability to reason using language-based analogies, or whether this ability is limited by a lack of access to vocabulary, both written and signed. This dissertation examines factors that…

With online education comes large amounts of data that can reveal in ways able to be examined quantitatively only sparingly in the past, the physics problem-solving profiles of students. This project uses fundamental research to analyze physics problem-solving behavior of students enrolled in the Massive Open Online Course 8.MReVx offered on the…

A common approach for introducing students to a new science concept is to present them with multiple cases of the phenomenon and ask them to explore. The expectation is that students will naturally take advantage of the multiple cases to support their learning and seek an underlying principle for the phenomenon. However, the success of such tasks…

An essential component for assessing the accuracy and fluency of language learners is understanding how mode of communication and task type affect performance in second-language (L2) acquisition. This study investigates how text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and face-to-face (F2F) oral interaction can influence the…

While the general planning advice offered to mathematics teachers seems to be to start with simple examples and build complexity progressively, the research reported in this article is a contribution to the body of literature that argues the reverse. That is, posing of appropriately complex tasks may actually prompt the use of more sophisticated…

The present study was designed to examine the underlying brain mechanisms of positive and negative emotional verbal fluency. Three verbal fluency tasks (one non-emotional phonemic task, two emotional tasks: "Joy" and "Fear") were used in this study. The results were analyzed for 35 healthy, Polish-speaking, right-handed adults…

This article explores the use of two epistemic adverbs in Argentine Spanish, "quizás" and "capaz". While scholars have noted the existence of "capaz" as an epistemic adverb, it had not been systematically studied prior to this investigation. To examine the epistemic stance of the adverbs, 117 participants completed an…

The paper-and-pencil Mental Rotation Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) consistently produces large sex differences favoring men (Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995). In this task, participants select 2 of 4 answer choices that are rotations of a probe stimulus. Incorrect choices (i.e., foils) are either mirror reflections of the probe or…

This study evaluates the way in which interpreters activate the source language and the target language (TL) when they perform the interpreting task. We focused on syntactic ambiguities. In sentences like "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony," two antecedents ("servant" and "actress") are…

The learned predictiveness effect or LPE is the finding that when people learn that certain cues are reliable predictors of an outcome in an initial stage of training (phase 1), they exhibit a learning bias in favor of these cues in a subsequent training involving new outcomes (phase 2) despite all cues being equally reliable in phase 2. In…