Four experiments investigated the role of reference frames during the acquisition and development of spatial knowledge, when learning occurs incrementally across views. In two experiments, participants learned overlapping spatial layouts. Layout 1 was first studied in isolation, and Layout 2 was later studied in the presence of Layout 1. The…

Often when failing to solve problems, individuals report some idea of the solution, but cannot explicitly access the idea. We investigated whether such intuition would relate to improvements in solving and to the manner in which a problem was solved after a 24- hour delay. On Day 1, participants attempted to solve Compound Remote Associate…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the comprehension of questions beginning with different wh- question words presented in two referential conditions to individuals with intellectual disability (ID). Thirty-nine school-age participants completed a battery of who, what, where, when, why, and how questions with and without a picture…

This dissertation articulates a writing pedagogy based on a theory of "intermodality" to help writing instructors navigate the affordances and challenges of multimodal composition. Drawing from recent discoveries in neuroscience about how the brain makes meaning, I situate this pedagogy of intermodality--literally, "between the…

A number of human brain areas showing a larger response to faces than to objects from different categories, or to scrambled faces, have been identified in neuroimaging studies. Depending on the statistical criteria used, the set of areas can be overextended or minimized, both at the local (size of areas) and global (number of areas) levels. Here…

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were…

There is some evidence for sex differences in habituation in the human fetus, but it is unknown whether this is due to differences in central processing (habituation) or in more peripheral processes, sensory or motor, involved in the response. This study examined whether the sex of the fetus influenced auditory habituation at 33 weeks of…

Background: Numerous studies show clear evidence that children display typicality effects during early word learning. However, little is known of the typicality of stimuli used by standardized language tests to assess children's language development. Aims: To examine the typicality of stimuli used by the Reynell Developmental Language Scales--III…

Recent studies have demonstrated that central cues, such as eyes and arrows, reflexively trigger attentional shifts. However, it is not clear whether the attentional mechanisms induced by these two cues are similar or rather differ in some important way. We investigated hemispheric lateralization of the orienting effects induced by the two cue…

When searching for a "pop-out" target, interference from a salient but irrelevant distractor can be reduced or even prevented under certain circumstances. Here, five experiments were conducted to further our understanding of three different aspects of top-down interference reduction: first, whether or not qualitatively different search modes can…

Cognitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation,…

In a crowded dynamic world, temporal expectations guide our attention in time. Prior investigations have consistently demonstrated that temporal expectations speed motor behavior. We explore effects of temporal expectation on "perceptual" speed in three nonspeeded, cued recognition paradigms. Different hazard rate functions for the…

Current debate in mental imagery research revolves around the perceptual and cognitive role of eye movements to "nothing" (Ferreira, Apel, & Henderson, 2008; Richardson, Altmann, Spivey, & Hoover, 2009). While it is established that eye movements are comparable when inspecting a scene (or hearing a scene description) as when…

We investigated the influences of phonological similarity on the time course of spoken word processing in Mandarin Chinese. Event related potentials were recorded while adult native speakers of Mandarin ("N" = 19) judged whether auditory words matched or mismatched visually presented pictures. Mismatching words were of the following…

The visual front-end of reading is most often associated with orthographic processing. The left ventral occipito-temporal cortex seems to be preferentially tuned for letter string and word processing. In contrast, little is known of the mechanisms responsible for pre-orthographic processing: the processing of character strings regardless of…