In this study, we examined the efficacy of gestures for the acquisition of L2 segmental phonology. Despite teachers' frequent use of gestures in the classroom to teach pronunciation, the field lacks empirical support for this practice. We attempted to fill this gap by investigating the effects of handclapping on the development of L2 Japanese…

A consistent finding in the Stroop literature is that congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between words presented in incongruent vs. congruent colors) are larger for mostly-congruent items (e.g., the word RED presented most often in red) than for mostly-incongruent items (e.g., the word GREEN presented most often in…

We present evidence that experience and cholinergic modulation in an early sensory network interact to improve certainty about olfactory stimuli. The data we present are in agreement with existing theoretical ideas about the functional role of acetylcholine but highlight the importance of early sensory networks in addition to cortical networks. We…

Body image is an important component of the complex mechanism of personal identity. The subjective component of body image refers to a person's satisfaction with their body size or specific parts of your body. The aim of this study was to verify the ability to correlate body image with the actual image of others. This study presents empirical…

This article explores the affective dimensions of comedy education and performance through workshops with undergraduate acting students in Manchester, UK. Drawing on Suzanne Langer's process philosophy and recent research in affect studies, the authors compose complex mappings of affective intensity as it circulates through stand-up comedic…

Spatial skill assessment and training are promising fields of application for tablets, as touch-based interaction can prime and support mental transformations of spatial knowledge. We report on a study with 49 secondary school students who used our iPad app to solve mental and physical rotation tasks. During physical rotation, students were able…

Automaticity can be established by consistently reinforcing contingencies during practice. During reinforcement learning, however, new relations can also be derived, which were never directly reinforced. For instance, reinforcing the overlapping contingencies A [right arrow] B and A [right arrow] C, can lead to a new relation B-C, which was never…

The presence of a human figure in a scene appears to change how people describe it. About 20% of participants take the human figure's viewpoint (Tversky and Hard in Cognition 110:124-129, 2009. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.10.008). Five exploratory studies compare descriptions of a scene with no person to descriptions of a scene with a…

Counterconditioning (CC) is a form of retroactive interference that inhibits expression of learned behavior. But similar to extinction, CC can be a fairly weak and impermanent form of interference, and the original behavior is prone to relapse. Research on CC is limited, especially in humans, but prior studies suggest it is more effective than…

A ChE process safety assignment using case study videos produced by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is described. Study of student perceptions of video quality and effectiveness of 25 CSB videos identified a number of entries highly-regarded by students which would make good choices for in-class discussion/assignments. Student ratings of…

Responses to infant signals are critical to infant development and well-being. However, brain mechanisms underlying paternal responses to infant crying are still largely unknown. Here using EEG, we investigated brain activations in two different groups, 10 fathers and 10 non-fathers, in response to infant-related sounds: typically developing…

Benefits of synchronous presentation of multisensory compared to unisensory cues are well established. However, the generality of such findings to children's learning with visual and haptic sensory cue pairings is unclear. Children aged 6 to 10 years (N = 180) participated in a novel tabletop category-learning paradigm with visual, haptic, or…

Purpose: Aphasia is a language disorder caused by acquired brain injury, which generally involves difficulty naming objects. Naming ability is assessed by measuring picture naming, and models of naming performance have mostly focused on accuracy and excluded valuable response time (RT) information. Previous approaches have therefore ignored the…

Sound-augmented toys producing factual knowledge were thought to encourage incidental, playful learning in children with visual impairments (VIs). A group of 15 children with VIs and 22 sighted controls played with a sound-augmented savannah landscape and listened to an informative story in a counterbalanced order. Children's knowledge about…

This study investigated how Korean toddlers' perception of stop categories develops in the acoustic dimensions of VOT and F0. To examine the developmental trajectory of VOT and F0 in toddlers' perceptual space, a perceptual identification test with natural and synthesized sound stimuli was conducted with 58 Korean monolingual children (aged 2-4…