Eye movements are often misdirected toward a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study…

Young preschool children aged 2 and 3 years were exposed to a novel paradigm designed to train visual perception skills. The results indicate that children of this age can be trained to perform a percept deprivation task that requires a sophisticated understanding of attention not normally mastered until 3.5-4 years. Results are discussed with…

This research investigated the extent and nature of the informational support that enables young children to understand pictures as symbols. Two experiments were conducted using an object-retrieval task. The first experiment varied the amount (complete and no instructions) and kind of information (intended function of the symbol and…

Human adults are more accurate at discriminating faces from their own race than faces from another race. This "other-race effect" (ORE) has been characterized as a reflection of face processing specialization arising from differential experience with own-race faces. We examined whether 3.5-month-old infants exhibit ORE using morphed faces on which…

Visual stress is the experience of unpleasant visual symptoms when engaged in reading and some other visual tasks. There is currently no objective diagnostic test for this condition, which affects a substantial proportion of the population and which can disrupt development of reading skills. The reliability of subjective reports of symptoms has…

Many studies have shown that infants prefer infant-directed (ID) speech to adult-directed (AD) speech. ID speech functions to aid language learning, obtain and/or maintain an infant's attention, and create emotional communication between the infant and caregiver. We examined psychophysiological responses to ID speech that varied in affective…

This study, the purpose of which is to determine an efficient instructional design for different levels of spatial abilities, investigates: (1) the main effects of visual treatments in simulation environments on comprehension and the transfer of chemistry knowledge and (2) the interaction effects of the visual treatments and the learners' spatial…

The authors aimed to investigate factors associated with smoking cessation among adolescents after tobacco intervention. They examined smokers (n = 127) from one birth cohort (n = 545) in the city of Kotka in Finland. These smokers were randomized in 3 intervention groups the dentist (n = 44) and the school nurse (n = 42 groups), and a control…

College students viewed a short multimedia PowerPoint presentation consisting of 16 narrated slides explaining lightning formation (Experiment 1) or 8 narrated slides explaining how a car's braking system works (Experiment 2). Each slide appeared for approximately 8-10 s and contained a diagram along with 1-2 sentences of narration spoken in a…

Many elementary school teachers with a passion for teaching social studies are finding that the administratively defined time for direct instruction in social studies is becoming increasingly restricted. Fortunately for the teacher who is convinced that social and civic education should be at the center of the elementary school curriculum, where…

This study examines the cognitive costs of navigation aids in a hypermedia learning task. In a 2(navigable vs. non-navigable) x 2(map vs. content list) experimental design cognitive requirements were measured by users' eye movement data. Additionally, data from users' navigation operations, knowledge acquisition, and subjective evaluation of the…

This report describes the findings of an analysis of a series of action research projects conducted by Vigo County School Corporation at Terre Haute South Vigo High School (hereinafter referred to as South Vigo). During the 2008-2009 school year, 19 teachers at South Vigo participated in independent action research studies regarding the extent to…

"Art and Social Justice Education" offers inspiration and tools for educators to craft critical, meaningful, and transformative arts education curriculum and arts integration projects. The images, descriptive texts, essays, and resources are grounded within a clear social justice framework and linked to ideas about culture as commons. Essays and a…

When asked questions, children often avert their gaze. Furthermore, the frequency of such gaze aversion (GA) is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing, suggesting that GA is a good indicator of children's thinking and comprehension. However, little is known about how teachers detect and interpret such gaze signals. In Study 1 teaching…

Recent eye tracking studies of face processing have produced differing accounts of how and whether children with autism differ from their typically developing peers. The two groups' gaze patterns appear to differ for dynamic videos of social scenes, but not for static photos of isolated individuals. The present study replicated and extended…