This study evaluated the impact of a computerized visuospatial memory training intervention on the memory and behavioral skills of children with Down syndrome. Teaching assistants were trained to support the delivery of a computerized intervention program to individual children over a 10-16 week period in school. Twenty-one children aged 7-12…

Children who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) face difficulty in classroom situations due to their lessened ability to learn by conventional methods. Children with ADHD excel in some tasks, but perform poorly in others because of differences in the ways that their brains acquire and retain information. Slower learning pace,…

Problem solving has been a core theme in education for several decades. Educators and policy makers agree on the importance of the role of problem solving skills for school and real life success. A primary purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of cognitive abilities on mathematical problem solving performance of students. The…

The purpose of the study was to compare 2D and 3D visual presentation styles, both still frame and animation, on subjects' brain activity measured by the amplitude of EEG alpha wave and on their recall to see if alpha power and recall differ significantly by depth and movement of visual presentation style and by spatial intelligence. In addition,…

This report describes the longitudinal development of one student, Drew, in terms of his unit concepts in area and volume measurement situations across Grades 2 through 5. Data were collected during individual interviews and an open-response assessment within the context of a four-year longitudinal teaching experiment. Results indicate that Drew's…

Traditional spatial analysis and data mining methods fall short of extracting temporal information from data. This inability makes their use difficult to study changes and the associated mechanisms of many geographic phenomena of interest, for example, land-use. On the other hand, the growing availability of land-change data over multiple time…

Thirteen autistic and 14 typically developing children (controls) imitated hand/arm gestures and performed mirror drawing; both tasks assessed ability to reorganize the relationship between spatial goals and the motor commands needed to acquire them. During imitation, children with autism were less accurate than controls in replicating hand shape,…

This dissertation addresses the research challenge of developing efficient new methods for discovering useful patterns and knowledge in large volumes of electronically collected spatiotemporal activity data. I propose to analyze three types of such spatiotemporal activity data in a methodological framework that integrates spatial analysis, data…

This is a study about the didactical organization of a research based group of activities designed using APOS theory to help university students make constructions, needed to understand and graph two-variable functions, but found to be lacking in previous studies. The model of the "moments of study" of the Anthropological Theory of…

How is number-concept acquisition related to overall language development? Experiments 1 and 2 measured number-word knowledge and general vocabulary in a total of 59 children, ages 30-60 months. A strong correlation was found between number-word knowledge and vocabulary, independent of the child's age, contrary to previous results (D. Ansari et…

Four studies using a computerized paradigm investigated whether children's imitation performance is content-specific and to what extent dependent on other cognitive processes such as trial-and-error learning, recall, and observational learning. Experiment 1 showed that 3-year-olds could successfully imitate what we call novel cognitive rules…

The present study tested whether coding of tone pitch relative to a referent contributes to the correspondence effect between the pitch height of an auditory stimulus and the location of a lateralized response. When left-right responses are mapped to high or low pitch tones, performance is better with the high-right/low-left mapping than with the…

Stimulus repetition often leads to facilitated processing, resulting in neural decreases (repetition suppression) and faster RTs (repetition priming). Such repetition-related effects have been attributed to the facilitation of repeated cognitive processes and/or the retrieval of previously encoded stimulus-response (S-R) bindings. Although…

Recent research suggests that individuals with relatively weak global precedence (i.e., a smaller propensity to view visual stimuli in a configural manner) show a reduced face inversion effect (FIE). Coupled with such findings, a number of recent studies have demonstrated links between an advantage for feature-based processing and the presentation…

A new spatial ability test was administered online to 223 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory science courses. The 30-item multiple choice test measures individual differences in ability to identify the two-dimensional cross section of a three-dimensional geometric solid, a skill that has been identified as important in science,…