Existing research shows that the order in which evidence arrives can bias its evaluation and the resulting decision in favor of information encountered early on. We used eye-tracking to study the underlying cognitive mechanisms in the context of incentivized financial choices based on real world market data. Subjects learned about the…

Empathy is fundamental in our abilities to achieve healthy, happy, socially successful lives. The importance of its inclusion in educational pedagogical practices and classroom instruction is highly emphasized, yet very little research has been conducted to examine artistic exercises as effective ways for promoting empathy through pedagogy. VTS is…

Courses: Any course that examines mediated and/or online communication, including but not limited to--Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication Theory, Interpersonal Communication, Introduction to Communication, and Organizational Communication. Objectives: In this single-class activity, students apply their knowledge of mediated…

Objective: Little is known about cognition's effect on jump-landing movement patterns. Design: Participants completed three baseline cognitive tasks. Then, participants performed three jump-landing trials per condition (dual-task trials (DT)): Stroop Color Word test (SCWT), Symbol Digits Modalities test (SDMT), Brooks Visuospatial task (BVT), and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to introduce a method of eliciting conversational behavior with many aspects of realism, which may be used to study the impacts of hearing impairment and noise on verbal communication; to describe the characteristics of speech and language participants produced during the task; and to assess participants'…

Heterogeneous effects of semantic distance in language production have sparked a debate on the central assumption of many language production models, namely that lexical selection is a competitive process. In the present ERP study, we manipulated semantic distance in the picture word interference (PWI) paradigm systematically within taxonomic…

Purpose: Degraded temporal processing associated with aging may be a contributing factor to older adults' hearing difficulties, especially in adverse listening environments. This degraded processing may affect the ability to distinguish between words based on temporal duration cues. The current study investigates the effects of aging and hearing…

Insomnia is a common source of distress in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Two characteristics of ASD could be relevant to insomnia complaints by hampering the entrainment of a circadian sleep-wake rhythm. First, sensory hyper-reactivity could lead to bright light avoidance and thus affect photoperiodic input to the circadian system.…

This study investigated the role of sequential processing in spoken language outcomes for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), ages 5;3-11;4, by comparing them to children with typical hearing (TH), ages 6;3-9;7, on sequential learning and memory tasks involving easily nameable and difficult-to-name visual stimuli. Children who are DHH…

A fundamental question for human memory research relates to the role of attention during the binding of distinct components into an integrated representation. A number of important differences exist between the working memory and episodic memory literature in terms of methodological implementation and empirical outcomes. For instance, episodic…

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have symptoms of sensory hypersensitivity. Several studies have shown high individual variations in temporal processing of tactile stimuli. We hypothesized that these individual differences are linked to differences in hyper-reactivity among individuals with ASD. Participants performed two tasks…

Purpose: The current study examined the role of attention and language ability in nonverbal rule induction performance in a demographically diverse sample of school-age children. Method: The participants included 43 English-speaking monolingual and 65 Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 9 years. Core Language Index…

Featural approaches to second language phonetic acquisition posit that the development of new phonetic norms relies on sub-phonemic features, expressed through a constellation of articulatory gestures and their corresponding acoustic cues, which may be shared across multiple phonemes. Within featural approaches, largely supported by research in…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

Extracting general rules from specific examples is important, as we must face the same challenge displayed in various formats. Previous studies have found that bimodal presentation of grammar-like rules (e.g. ABA) enhanced 5-month-olds' capacity to acquire a rule that infants failed to learn when the rule was presented with visual presentation of…