Empathy can be experienced in powerful ways through art education when students explore and connect with others from different communities and their own concepts of self (Jeffers, 2009). In art education, students see images from various visual cultures and if they are to understand and become open to cultures or groups different from them, they…

Younger brains are noisier information processing systems; this means that information for younger individuals has to allow clearer differentiation between those aspects that are required for the processing task in hand (the "signal") and those that are not (the "noise"). We compared toddler-directed and adult-directed TV…

If a speaker tells us that "some guests were late to the party," we typically infer that not all were. Implicatures, in which an ambiguous statement ("some and possibly all") is strengthened pragmatically (to "some and not all"), are a paradigm case of pragmatic reasoning. Inferences of this sort are difficult for…

This research examined whether the informational advantage of an animation over a static picture (and over no visualizations as a control condition) can be compensated by presenting the information in the text that constitutes this informational advantage. In addition, it was investigated whether learners' spatial abilities acted as a compensator…

Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting…

This study investigated whether brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) genotype moderated inhibitory control during an emotionally valenced task in a sample of internationally adopted adolescents (N = 109, ages 12-13 years) who spent their early years in institutional care. Participants were genotyped for the Val66Met polymorphism of the BDNF…

Although bilingual individuals know 2 languages, research suggests that the languages are not separate in the mind. This is especially evident when a bilingual individual switches languages midsentence, indicating that mental representations are, to some degree, overlapping or integrated across the 2 languages. In 2 eye-tracking experiments, we…

Humans possess a tendency to rapidly and consistently make character evaluations from mere facial appearance. Recent work shows that this tendency emerges surprisingly early: children as young as 3-years-old provide adult-like assessments of others on character attributes such as "nice," "strong," and "smart" based…

Previous research on reference tracking has revealed a tendency towards over-explicitness in second language (L2) learners. Only limited evidence exists that this trend extends to situations where the learner's first and second languages do not share a sensory-motor modality. Using a story-telling paradigm, this study examined how hearing novice…

Drawing on cognitive theories, this study intends to investigate the effects of explicit visual cues which have been proposed as a critical factor in facilitating understanding of biological images. Three diagrams from Taiwanese textbooks with implicit visual cues, involving the concepts of biological classification systems, fish taxonomy, and…

Classic theories of cognitive control conceptualized controlled processes as slow, strategic, and willful, with automatic processes being fast and effortless. The context-specific proportion compatibility (CSPC) effect, the reduction in the compatibility effect in a context (e.g., location) associated with a high relative to low likelihood of…

Purpose: This study documented the efficacy of visual-acoustic biofeedback intervention for residual rhotic errors, relative to a comparison condition involving traditional articulatory treatment. All participants received both treatments in a single-subject experimental design featuring alternating treatments with blocked randomization of…

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the cognitive approach to eating disorders, which postulates that patients selectively attend to information associated with eating, body shape, and body weight. The unreliability of self-report measures in eating disorders due to strong denial of illness gave rise to experimental studies inspired…

Illustration is always used as an example to make the written text or the utterance more clear in general. In Winarski's opinion (1997), one picture equals thousands of words. That is to say, illustrations are capable to express the meaning of unfamiliar language or a great deal of information in the reading material by vivid pictures, tables,…

The use of apps in education is becoming more frequent. However, the mechanisms of attention and processing of their contents and their consequences in learning have not been sufficiently studied. The objective of this work is to analyze how information is processed and learned and how visual attention takes place. It also investigates the…