In higher education, many high-enrollment introductory courses have evolved into "gatekeeper" courses due to their high failure rates. These courses prevent many students from attaining their educational goals and often become graduation roadblocks. At the authors' home institution, general chemistry has become a gatekeeper course in which…

Cognitive models of social phobia (SP) and empirical evidence in adults suggest that affected individuals overestimate arousal symptoms such as heart rate (HR) during social stress and worry about their visibility in public. To date, little is known about these aspects in childhood social anxiety, an important precursor of the disorder. We…

Objective: Guidelines from a variety of jurisdictions for the health-promoting schools (HPS) approach include healthy school policy as a critical element. Research also supports the importance of policy; however, there seems to be a lack of information on how to develop and implement policy. The article examines the processes involved in one…

This study examined the effects a 6-week mindfulness group had on 31 college students who were intending to enter helping professions (e.g., nursing, social work, counseling, psychology, and teaching). Group activities included meditation, yoga, a body scan exercise, and qi gong. The group members completed the Perceived Stress Scale, the…

Accounts of speech perception disagree on whether listeners perceive the acoustic signal (Diehl, Lotto, & Holt, 2004) or the vocal tract gestures that produce the signal (e.g., Fowler, 1986). In this dissertation, I outline a research program using a phenomenon called "perceptual compensation for coarticulation" (Mann, 1980) to examine this…

This article argues that Eduardo Lopez Bago's "La prostituta" evidences a deprivileging of a "visual" approach to narration and of the sensorial predominance of sight. Rather, Lopez Bago harnesses odors and deploys them as an important structuring device and a central generator of meaning, permitting his novel to be judged on its ability to evoke…

Association field models of contour integration suggest that local band-pass elements are spatially grouped to global contours within limited bands of spatial frequency (Field, Hayes, & Hess, 1993). While results for local orientation and spacing variation render support for AF models, effects of spatial frequency (SF) have rarely been addressed.…

Previous studies have shown that young preschool children are highly sensitive to mutual engagement and struggle to diagnose the visibility of a figure when their facial area is occluded. The present study aimed to explore the specificity of engagement by varying (a) the orientation of a figure relative to an observer and (b) the visible area of…

The human visual system can notice differences between memories of previous visual inputs and perceptions of new visual inputs, but the comparison process that detects these differences has not been well characterized. In this study, the authors tested the hypothesis that differences between the memory of a stimulus array and the perception of a…

How much of infant behaviour can be accounted for by signal-level analyses of stimuli? The current paper directly compares the moment-by-moment behaviour of 8-month-old infants in an audiovisual preferential looking task with that of several computational models that use the same video stimuli as presented to the infants. One type of model…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether deliberate increases in speaking rate would serve to decrease the amount of nasality in the speech of severely hearing-impaired individuals. Method: The participants were 11 severely to profoundly hearing-impaired students, ranging in age from 12 to 19 years (M = 16 years). Each…

The current research investigated, firstly, whether individuals with high levels of mild autistic-like traits display a similar profile of embedded figures test (EFT) and global motion performance to that seen in autism. Secondly, whether differences in EFT performance are related to enhanced local processing or reduced global processing in the…

With increasing numbers of preterm infants surviving, the impact of preterm birth on later cognitive development presents a major interest. This study investigates the impact of preterm birth on later dorsal- and ventral-stream functioning. An atypical pattern of performance was found for preterm children relative to full-term controls, but in the…

A tacit but fundamental assumption of the theory of signal detection is that criterion placement is a noise-free process. This article challenges that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and presents the noisy decision theory of signal detection (ND-TSD). Generalized equations for the isosensitivity function and for measures of…

Learning the structure of a sequence of target locations when target location is not the response dimension and the sequence of target locations is uncorrelated with the sequence of responses is called pure perceptual-based sequence learning. The paradigm introduced by G. Remillard (2003) was used to determine whether orienting of visuospatial…