The number of students with learning disabilities (LD) attending postsecondary institutions has increased steadily over the past two decades. Many of these students have language-based learning difficulties that create barriers to success in foreign language (FL) courses. Many institutions have responded by providing these students with exemptions…

The acquisition and consolidation of a new grapho-motor symbol into long-term memory was studied in 5-year-old children with language impairment (LI) and peers matched for age and visual-motor integration skills. The children practiced the production of a new symbol and were tested 24 h and two weeks post-practice day. Differences in performance…

The primary objective of this research was to compare procedure-based task performance using three common mobile screen sizes: ultra mobile personal computer (7 in./17.8 cm), personal data assistant (3.5 in./8.9 cm), and SmartPhone (2.8 in./7.1 cm). Subjects used these three screen sizes to view and execute a computer maintenance procedure.…

Three tools for teaching symmetry in the context of an upper-level undergraduate or introductory graduate course on the chemical applications of group theory are presented. The first is a collection of objects that have the symmetries of all the low-symmetry and high-symmetry point groups and the point groups with rotational symmetries from 2-fold…

Recent studies suggest that basic effects which are markers of visual word recognition in Indo-European languages cannot be obtained in Hebrew or in Arabic. Although Hebrew has an alphabetic writing system, just like English, French, or Spanish, a series of studies consistently suggested that simple form-orthographic priming, or…

The process of integrating visual information and planning a safe crossing is cognitively demanding for many young children. We assessed relations between traffic characteristics, aspects of children's executive functioning (EF), and pedestrian behavior, with the aim being to determine whether well-developed EF would predict safer pedestrian…

Inversion disproportionately impairs recognition of face stimuli compared to nonface stimuli arguably due to the holistic manner in which faces are processed. A qualification is put forward in which the first point fixated on is different for upright and inverted faces and this carries some of the face-inversion effect. Three experiments explored…

Practicing a visual task commonly results in improved performance. Often the improvement does not transfer well to a new retinal location, suggesting that it is mediated by changes occurring in early visual cortex, and indeed neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies both demonstrate that perceptual learning is associated with altered activity…

Are there consequences of calling objects by their names? Lupyan (2008) suggested that overtly labeling objects impairs subsequent recognition memory because labeling shifts stored memory representations of objects toward the category prototype (representational shift hypothesis). In Experiment 1, we show that processing objects at the basic…

Several different explanations have been proposed to account for the search asymmetry (SA) for angry schematic faces (i.e., the fact that an angry face target among friendly faces can be found faster than vice versa). The present study critically tested the perceptual grouping account, (a) that the SA is not due to emotional factors, but to…

The preview benefit describes the finding that participants can prioritize the selection of new stimuli by the top-down inhibition of previously presented (previewed) items already in the field (Watson & Humphreys, 1997). Previous work has shown that if the old items undergo a permanent shape change when the new are added, then the old items…

When target-defining features are specified in advance, attentional target selection in visual search is controlled by preparatory top-down task sets. We used ERP measures to study voluntary target selection in the absence of such feature-specific task sets, and to compare it to selection that is guided by advance knowledge about target features.…

Recent studies show that both adults and young children possess powerful statistical learning capabilities to solve the word-to-world mapping problem. However, the underlying mechanisms that make statistical learning possible and powerful are not yet known. With the goal of providing new insights into this issue, the research reported in this…

Although previous research shows verbal recall of time-compressed narration is significantly enhanced when it is accompanied by a representational adjunct picture (Ritzhaupt & Barron, 2008), the reason for this increased performance remains unclear. One explanation, explored in the current study, is based on the Conjoint Retention Hypothesis…

Context effects in category rating on a 7-point scale are shown to reverse direction depending on feedback. Context (skewed stimulus frequencies) was manipulated between and feedback within subjects in two experiments. The diverging predictions of prototype- and exemplar-based scaling theories were tested using two representative models: ANCHOR…