The purpose of this study was to examine the role of phonological information on visual word recognition by using letter transposition effects. The Korean writing system gives a unique opportunity to investigate such phenomenon since the transposition of the beginning consonant (onset) and the end consonant (coda) of a certain syllable allows one…

We explore the transition from school to university through a commognitive (Sfard 2008) analysis of twenty-two students' examination scripts from the end of year examination of a first year, year-long module on Sets, Numbers, Proofs and Probability in a UK mathematics department. Our analysis of the scripts relies on a preliminary analysis of the…

Working memory, the system allowing for a simultaneous maintenance and processing of information, is typically conceived as a capacity limited system. A proposed method to transcend its standard maintenance capacity is to maintain multifeature objects, instead of isolated features. Several studies have shown that multifeature memory items are…

We investigated the ability to detect a face among other visual objects in a complex visual array in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children, as well as in adults. To this end, we used a visual search paradigm implemented on a touch-tablet device. Subjects (N = 100) saw up to eighty 3 × 3 visual search arrays and had to find and tap upon a target--a face…

Recently, there has been a transition from traditional paper or computer-based learning environments to smartpad-based learning environments, which are based on touch and involve various cognitive strategies such as touch operation and note taking. Accordingly, the use of smartpads can provide an effective learning environment through…

The Department of Basic Education in South Africa has identified factorisation as a problem area in Mathematics teaching. Learners in earlier grades are exposed to mathematical tasks, involving concepts, such as factors of integers, fractions, equivalent fractions and prime numbers, that are easier to solve when the divisibility rules are applied.…

In infancy, maternal socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with real-time language processing skills, but whether or not (and if so, how) this relationship carries into adulthood is unknown. We explored the effects of maternal SES in college-aged adults on eye-tracked, spoken sentence comprehension tasks using the visual world paradigm. When…

When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers'…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is a crucial repository of information when events unfold rapidly before our eyes, yet it maintains only a fraction of the sensory information encoded by the visual system. Here, we tested the hypothesis that saccadic eye movements provide a natural bottleneck for the transition of fragile content in sensory memory…

Eye-tracking is the measurement of eye motions and point of gaze of a viewer. Advances in this technology have been essential to our understanding of many forms of visual learning, including the development of visual expertise. In recent years, these studies have been extended to the medical professions, where eye-tracking technology has helped us…

This study investigated the cognitive processes and reader characteristics of sixth graders who had good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams. We first measured the reading ability and reading self-efficacy of sixth-grade participants, and then recorded their eye movements while they were reading an illustrated…

The genetic diversity contained in a population can be used to engage the audience in an understanding of human genotypes and phenotypes. With a series of simple examples of well-documented sensory phenotypes related to the perception of colour, aromas or food preference, the diversity of the audience can be easily explored. The collecting of…

This study investigated the phonological contribution during visual word recognition in child readers as a function of general reading expertise (third and fifth grades) and specific word exposure (frequent and less-frequent words). An intermodal priming in lexical decision task was performed. Auditory primes (identical and unrelated) were used in…

Visual information influences speech perception in both infants and adults. It is still unknown whether lexical representations are multisensory. To address this question, we exposed 18-month-old infants (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) to new word-object pairings: Participants either heard the acoustic form of the words or saw the talking face in…

Unlike other animals, humans have the unique ability to share and use verbal instructions to prepare for upcoming tasks. Recent research showed that instructions are sufficient for the automatic, reflex-like activation of responses. However, systematic studies into the limits of these automatic effects of task instructions remain relatively…