Background: The use of common psychological assessment tools is invalidated with persons with PIMD. The aim of this study was to test the feasibility of using a visual habituation procedure with a group of adults with PIMD, to develop a new theoretical and practical framework for the assessment of cognitive abilities. Methods: To test the…

Participants completed a battery of 3 attentional control (AC) tasks (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop, as in Hutchison, 2007) and performed a lexical decision task with symmetrically associated (e.g., "sister-brother") and asymmetrically related primes and targets presented in both the forward (e.g., "atom-bomb") and backward…

This author presents variable and stimulating activities using songs to encourage students to connect with language. Seven dynamic activities include Song Pictures, Re-order It, Matching Meanings, Changing the Text, Song Strip Connections, Song Cards, and Pair Watching. All are outlined to facilitate their use, and many have added extensions and…

Learning to ignore irrelevant stimuli is essential to achieving efficient and fluid attention, and serves as the complement to increasing attention to relevant stimuli. The different cholinergic (ACh) subsystems within the basal forebrain regulate attention in distinct but complementary ways. ACh projections from the substantia innominata/nucleus…

In classical conditioning, the temporal sequence of stimulus presentations is critical for the association between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). In forward conditioning, the CS precedes the US and is learned as a predictor for the US. Thus it acquires properties to elicit a behavioral response, defined as…

Background: Previous studies of therapy for acquired anomia have treated nouns in isolation. The effect on nouns in connected speech remains unclear. In a recent study in 2012, we used a novel noun syntax therapy and found an increase in the number of determiner plus noun constructions in narrative after therapy. Aims: Two aims arose from the…

The authors assessed 3 of the currently available implicit association tests designed to measure attitudes toward persons with disabilities. The Revised Multiple Disability Implicit Association Test, the Implicit Association Test for Attitudes Toward Athletes With Disabilities, and the Disability Attitude Implicit Association Test were related to…

Although using images for teaching has been a common practice in science classrooms (Gordon & Pea, 1995) understanding the purpose or how to choose images has not typically been intentional. For this dissertation three separate studies relating to choosing and using images are prepared with environmental science in mind. Each of the studies…

The present study focuses on examining the hypothesis that auditory temporal perception deficit is a basic cause for reading disabilities among dyslexics. This hypothesis maintains that reading impairment is caused by a fundamental perceptual deficit in processing rapid auditory or visual stimuli. Since the auditory perception involves a number of…

The research paradigm invented by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in the late 1950s dominated the study of problem solving for more than three decades. But in the early 1990s, problem solving ceased to drive research on complex cognition. As part of this decline, Newell and Simon's most innovative research practices--especially their method for…

We investigated human performance on the Euclidean Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) and Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree Problem (MST-P) in regards to a factor that has previously received little attention within the literature: the spatial distributions of TSP and MST-P stimuli. First, we describe a method for quantifying the relative degree of…

Tabular data is pervasive in the form of spreadsheets and relational databases. Although tables often describe multivariate data without explicit network semantics, it may be advantageous to explore the data modeled as a graph or network for analysis. Even when a given table design conveys some static network semantics, analysts may want to look…

There is converging evidence that the feeling of conscious recollection is usually accompanied by the bound retrieval of context features of the encoding episode (e.g., Meiser, Sattler, & Weiber, 2008). Recently, however, important limiting conditions have been identified for the binding between context features in memory. For example, focusing on…

Performance in the stop-signal paradigm involves a balance between going and stopping, and one way that this balance is struck is through shifting priority away from the go task, slowing responses after a stop signal, and improving the probability of inhibition. In 6 experiments, the authors tested whether there is a corresponding shift in…

The following article by Barba (2012a) addresses Neuringer's proposal that variability is an operant dimension of behavior, that is, that variability can be reinforced, extinguished, and brought under stimulus control, just like any other response property. Barba confines his argument to methodological considerations: He points out that the…