Ten Rett syndrome (RS) girls and 10 control girls executed an attentional task in which a complex stimulus was shown followed by individual stimuli presented with distractors. Participants had to discriminate previously presented stimuli from distractors. RS girls carried out the task both in a condition with the containment of stereotypies and in…

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether…

The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, has been termed one of the benchmark findings that any theory of immediate memory must account for. Indeed, the effect led directly to the development of working memory and the phonological loop, and it is viewed as the best remaining…

Sensory integration (SI) therapy is a controversial intervention used in intervention for children with disabilities that is popular in the United States. Little is known about the use of SI therapy for children with disabilities in educational centres in developing nations such as Malaysia. Supervisors and teachers from seven educational…

Conceptual change instruction recognizes that students bring personal, or naive, conceptions to the classroom, which they use to explain their world, interpret situations, and create meaning (Driver et al. 2007). But what happens when students' personal conceptions are inconsistent with experts' views of scientific knowledge? Even after direct…

A study of the effects on responses to a word association task of varying the modality of the input of the stimulus word was used as a means of doing step-wise analysis of word association data. Subjects were 70 males and 70 females randomly selected from adult basic education classes in the Atlanta, Georgia, area and assigned to one of the…

The reinforcing properties of four sensory stimuli (continuous and flashing light, vibration, and sound), which were under the subject's control, were examined and the effect on stereotyped behavior of 24 severely retarded and autistic children were observed. Findings were interpreted to support the self-stimulation theory of stereotypy despite…

To determine the feasibility of using pictorial stimuli in preference assessments, multiple-stimulus preference assessments were conducted with two adults with mental retardation using both tangible stimuli and pictorial cards representing these same stimuli. Stimuli predicted by the tangible assessment were more potent reinforcers than those…

Investigates the effect of target size and presence, intensity, and location of sound on the visual following of infants one and two months of age. (Author/RH)

Two experiments used a visual habituation paradigm to examine infants' categorical discrimination of the medial stop consonants /aba/ and /apa/. Results provided evidence of infant categorical discrimination based solely on closure duration. Infants shifted their boundary toward shorter closure durations if they received pulsing during…

To explain human performance on the "Traveling Salesperson" problem (TSP), MacGregor, Ormerod, and Chronicle (2000) proposed that humans construct solutions according to the steps described by their convex-hull algorithm. Focusing on tour length as the dependent variable, and using only random or semirandom point sets, the authors…

Four pigeons were exposed to a token-reinforcement procedure with stimulus lights serving as tokens. Responses on one key (the token-production key) produced tokens that could be exchanged for food during an exchange period. Exchange periods could be produced by satisfying a ratio requirement on a second key (the exchange-production key). The…