Pivotal response treatment (PRT) is an empirically validated behavioral treatment that has widespread positive effects on communication, behavior, and social skills in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). For the first time, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to identify the neural correlates of successful response to…

This study explores changes in students' strategies as they solve different types of volume problems. Fifth graders were presented with pictures showing 3D objects and a unit cube; they determined how many cubes made up the object and explained their responses. We examined whether children transferred strategies across problem types, varying in…

This study aimed to examine the relations among property strategies, working memory, and multiplication tasks with 101 Chinese fourth-grade students. Two multiplication property strategies (associative and distributive) were compared with no strategy and demonstrated differentiated effects on students' accuracy and reaction time. Associative…

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. "The child ate the candies" following after "The child…

Student evaluations provide rich information about teaching performance, but a number of factors beyond teacher effectiveness influence student evaluations. In this study we examined the effects of professor gender and perceived age on ratings of effectiveness and rapport as well as academic performance. We also asked students to rate professor…

A research study conducted in an urban district middle school setting applies cognitive science principles to science vocabulary. Within the context of a personal story told by the lead investigator, the results of the study are shared and suggest that more active, engaging strategies with complex core curriculum may improve retention and…

Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to reuse the same structural pattern as one that was previously encountered (Bock, 1986). The effectiveness of structural priming has been an issue of much discussion in the field of second language acquisition over decades. This study aims at investigating the role of structural priming in…

This study investigates how shared picture book storytelling within a peer-group setting could stimulate causal reasoning in children aged 4½ to 6 years. Twenty-eight children from preschool classes of three schools were allocated to one of six groups (four to five children per group). Each group participated in six storytelling sessions over a…

By three years of age, children are skilled at assessing under which circumstances others can see things. However, nothing is known about whether they can use this knowledge to guide their own deceptive behaviour. Here we investigated 3-year-olds' ability to strategically inhibit or conceal forbidden actions that a nearby adult experimenter could…

The neural mechanisms underlying perceptual learning are still under investigation. Eureka effect is a form of rapid, long-lasting perceptual learning by which a degraded image, which appears meaningless when first seen, becomes recognizable after a single exposure to its undegraded version. We used online interference by focal 10-Hz repetitive…

Remember-Know (RK) and source memory tasks were designed to elucidate processes underlying memory retrieval. As part of more complex judgments, both tests produce a measure of old-new recognition, which is typically treated as equivalent to that derived from a standard recognition task. The present study demonstrates, however, that recognition…

It is generally assumed that emotion facilitates human vision in order to promote adaptive responses to a potential threat in the environment. Surprisingly, we recently found that emotion in some cases impairs the perception of elementary visual features (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009b). Here, we demonstrate that emotion improves fast temporal…

This study explored the causes of the reverse modality effect when learning from multimedia instruction. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (visual text or spoken text). The findings revealed a reverse modality effect wherein that those studying visual text outperformed those studying spoken text on three assessments. Further…

The current study investigated the effect of colour vs. black-and-white pictures on the stories children told using the pictures as stimuli. Participants were 22 preschool children aged 4-6 (M = 59.98, SD = 7.52) attending day-care centres in a Western Canadian city. Two story sets of five pictures each, depicting stories with similar structure,…

Everyday experience affords us many opportunities to learn about objects through multiple senses using physical interaction. Previous work has shown that active motor learning of unisensory items enhances memory and leads to the involvement of motor systems during subsequent perception. However, the impact of active motor learning on subsequent…