This study aimed to investigate the effects of feedback types and opportunities to change answers on the learners' achievement and their ability to solve physics problems. We compared three feedback types, namely (1) static feedback with hints, (2) reducing feedback with hints, and (3) knowledge of response, and two types of opportunities to…

People miss a high proportion of targets that only appear rarely. This low prevalence (LP) effect has implications for applied search tasks such as the clinical reading of mammograms. Computer aided detection (CAD) has been used to help radiologists search mammograms by highlighting areas likely to contain a cancer. Previous research has found a…

Local protein synthesis at synapses can provide a rapid supply of proteins to support synaptic changes during consolidation of new memories, but its role in the maintenance or updating of established memories is unknown. Consolidation requires new protein synthesis in the period immediately following learning, whereas established memories are…

The in-out effect refers to the tendency that novel words whose consonants follow an inward-wandering pattern (e.g., P-T-K) are rated more positively than stimuli whose consonants follow an outward-wandering pattern (e.g., K-T-P). While this effect appears to be reliable, it is not yet clear to what extent it generalizes to existing words in a…

Purpose: Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and…

Mind-wandering (MW) is a universal cognitive process that is estimated to comprise [approximately] 30% of our everyday thoughts. Despite its prevalence, the functional utility of MW remains a scientific blind spot. The present study sought to investigate whether MW serves a functional role in cognition. Specifically, we investigated whether MW…

Infants at elevated likelihood of developing autism display differences in sensory reactivity, especially hyporeactivity, as early as 7 months of age, potentially contributing to a developmental cascade of autism symptoms. Caregiver responsiveness, which has been linked to positive social communication outcomes, has not been adequately examined…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to describe changes in speech intelligibility and interrater and intrarater reliability of naive listeners' ratings of words produced by young children diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) over a period of motor-based intervention (dynamic temporal and tactile cueing [DTTC]). Method: A total of 120…

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

Children learn words in a social environment. In my dissertation, I examine how caregivers' social cues facilitate young children's word learning in settings that mirror their typical, dynamic learning environments. In Chapter 1, I overview prior work examining how social cues may support word learning, focusing on possible mechanisms underlying…

Incorporating virtual reality (VR) technology into training environments has been effective as it allows training to remain safe, efficient, and meaningful. Welding training is no exception, with research highlighting benefits such as decreased welder anxiety, increased cost- and time-efficiency, reduction in material usage, and advanced levels of…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) produced in laboratory settings contains acoustic cues, such as pauses, pitch changes, and vowel-lengthening that could facilitate breaking speech into smaller units, such as syntactically well-formed utterances, and the noun- and verb-phrases within them. It is unclear whether these cues are present in speech produced…

Differentiation of speech is predictable from abilities to discriminate the speed at which a sound reaches its optimum amplitude (rise time). This study investigated whether rise time identification of an affricate-fricative continuum would be impacted upon by dyslexia. Children between 10 and 14 years old identified sounds along a continuum of…

Which behavioral and visual information do teachers rely on when judging relevant characteristics of their students and which cues should they rely on? Drawing on Brunswik's Lens Model (Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments, University of California Press, 1956. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520350519), we…