This research compared the effects of several factors on sustained attention in four participants with mild or mild-to-moderate intellectual disabilities. In each session, each participant received an extended number of conditional discriminations that required a differential response to infrequently occurring target stimuli. We assessed sustained…

The attentional weight of a visual object depends on the contrast of the features of the object to its local surroundings (feature contrast) and the relevance of the features to one's goals (feature relevance). We investigated the dependency in partial report experiments with briefly presented stimuli but unspeeded responses. The task was to…

In two experiments, we examined the disruptive effects of a "can't answer" response option (CARO) on equivalence formation. The first experiment was a systematic replication of Duarte, Eikeseth, Rosales-Ruiz, and Baer (1998), in which participants in a CARO group and a No-CARO group performed conditional discrimination tasks with…

Flanker congruency effects were measured in a masked flanker task to assess the properties of spatial attention during conscious and nonconscious processing of form, color, and conjunctions of these features. We found that (1) consciously and nonconsciously processed colored shape distractors (i.e., flankers) produce flanker congruency effects;…

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

Do we access information from any object we can see, or do we access information only from objects that we intend to name? In 3 experiments using a modified multiple object naming paradigm, subjects were required to name several objects in succession when previews appeared briefly and simultaneously in the same location as the target as well as at…

People's forecasts from time series underestimate future values for upward trends and overestimate them for downward ones. This trend damping may occur because (a) people anchor on the last data point and make insufficient adjustment to take the trend into account, (b) they adjust toward the average of the trends they have encountered within the…

The purpose of this study was to develop an attention sequential mining mechanism for investigating the sequential patterns of children's visual scanning process in a computerized cancellation test. Participants had to locate and cancel the target amongst other non-targets in a structured form, and a random form with Chinese stimuli. Twenty-three…

Pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) represents up to two-thirds of autism spectrum disorders; however, it is usually described in terms of the symptoms not shared by autism. The study explores processing of neutral and emotional human stimuli (by auditory, visual and multimodal channels) in children with PDD-NOS (n =…

There has been a rapid proliferation of electronic books in recent years. Given that dual-language books may impose extra cognitive load on children's information processing capacity, we investigated whether multimedia features in e-books (i.e., audio narration and tracking animation) were effective in directing preschoolers' attention to print in…

Cognitive strategies are important tools for children with math difficulties (MD) in learning to solve word problems. The effectiveness of strategy training, however, depends on working memory capacity (WMC). Thus, children with MD but with relatively higher WMC are more likely to benefit from strategy training, whereas children with lower WMC may…

The pervasive use of visual representations in textbooks, curricula, and assessments underscores their importance in K-12 science education. For example, visual representations figure prominently in the recent publication of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States in Next generation science standards: for states, by states.…

Radicals are building blocks of Chinese complex characters and exhibit certain positional, phonological and semantic regularities. This study investigated whether adult non-native learners of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) were aware of the positional (orthographic), phonological and semantic information of radicals, and whether such…

Background: Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about children's sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of specific language impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. Aims: (1) To evaluate the effects of…

The purpose of this research was to determine the influence of two subcomponents of auditory short-term memory on the developmental trajectories of behavior problems. The sample included 7,058 children from the NLSY79--Children and Young Adult survey between the ages 5 and 14 years. Results suggested that anxious/depressed behavior increases…