In the present study, we test the effectiveness of a teaching intervention aiming at acquainting children aged four to six years with the concept of the sphericity of the earth and the causes of the phenomenon of day and night. The treatment comprised three units of activities that were developed collaboratively by a researcher and early years…

Introduction: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of reading racetracks and direct instruction flashcards with two students with behavior disorders. A token economy with a response cost component was also implemented to increase on-task behavior during data collection. Method: The participants were two eight-year-old males.…

Ego integrity, the last developmental task in Erikson's psychological theory, develops naturally among older people. However, the presence of loss-like physical disability-can considerably affect the quality of life, interactions, and well being of older adults. Hence, older people with physical disabilities need more assistance in accomplishing…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a developmental disorder typified by deficits in visuospatial cognition. To understand the nature of this deficit, we characterized how people with WS perceive visual orientation, a fundamental ability related to object identification. We compared WS participants to typically developing children (3-6 years of age) and…

Does learning to read influence one's visual skill? In Study 1, kindergartners from Hong Kong, Korea, Israel, and Spain were tested on word reading and a task of visual spatial skill. Chinese and Korean kindergartners significantly outperformed Israeli and Spanish readers on the visual task. Moreover, in all cultures except Korea, good readers…

A longstanding and fundamental debate in developmental science is whether knowledge is acquired through domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To date, there exists no tool to determine whether experimental data support one theoretical approach or the other. In this article, we argue that the U- and N-shaped curves found in a number of…

As a result of young people frequently exposing themselves to loud sounds, researchers are advocating education about the risks of contracting tinnitus. However, how pupils conceive of and learn about the biological aspects of hearing has not been extensively investigated. Consequently, the aim of the present study is to explore pupils' learning…

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

Effortful control (EC) refers to the ability to inhibit a dominant response to perform a subdominant one and has been shown as protective against a myriad of difficulties. Research examining precursors of EC has been limited to date, and in this study, infancy contributors to toddler EC were examined. Specifically, parent/family background…

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized in terms of behavioral deficits in areas of social behavior and language development. A failure to attend to the faces of others is the single best discriminator between 1-year-old children later diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those with typical development. Attending to the face of…

This study examines the facilitative effects of embodiment of a complex internal anatomical structure through three-dimensional ("3-D") interactivity in a virtual reality ("VR") program. Since Shepard and Metzler's influential 1971 study, it has been known that 3-D objects (e.g., multiple-armed cube or external body parts) are visually and…

Mandarin Chinese and many other tonal languages use tones that are defined as specific pitch patterns to distinguish syllables otherwise ambiguous. It had been shown that tones carry at least as much information as vowels in Mandarin Chinese [Surendran et al., 2005]. Surprisingly, though, many speech recognition systems for Mandarin Chinese have…

The aim of this study is to explore whether presentation format and prior knowledge affect the effectiveness of worked examples. The experiment was conducted through a specially designed online instrument. A 2X2X3 factorial before-and-after design was conducted. Three-way ANOVA was employed for data analysis. The result showed first, that prior…

Background: Previous research suggests that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a reduced preference for viewing social stimuli in the environment and impaired facial identity recognition. Methods: Here, we directly tested a link between these two phenomena in 13 ASD children and 13 age-matched typically developing (TD) controls.…

The "other-race effect" (ORE), or the finding that same-race faces are better recognized than other-race faces, is one of the best replicated phenomena in face recognition. The current article reviews existing evidence and theory and proposes a new theoretical framework for the ORE, which argues that the effect results from a confluence of social…