The present study investigates the joint role of spatial ability, imagery strategy and visuospatial working memory (VSWM) in spatial text processing. A set of 180 participants, half of them trained on the use of imagery strategy (training vs no-training groups), was further divided according to participants' high or low mental rotation ability…

We study people's abilities to transfer object category knowledge across visual and haptic domains. If a person learns to categorize objects based on inputs from one sensory modality, can the person categorize these same objects when the objects are perceived through another modality? Can the person categorize novel objects from the same…

The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues. More specifically, while satiation is a function of…

This dissertation investigates the temporal relation identification task. The goal is to construct consistent temporal relations between temporal entities (e.g., events and time expressions) in a narrative. Constructing consistent temporal relations is challenging due to the exponential increase in the number of candidates for temporal relations…

In the face of underspecified utterances, listeners routinely and without much apparent effort make the right kinds of pragmatic inferences about a speaker's intended meaning. This dissertation investigates the processing of scalar implicatures as a way of addressing how listeners perform this remarkable feat. In particular, the role of context in…

In this thesis, we consider estimation, coding, and sensor scheduling for energy efficient operation of wireless visual sensor networks (VSN), which consist of battery-powered wireless sensors with sensing (imaging), computation, and communication capabilities. The competing requirements for applications of these wireless sensor networks (WSN)…

One important function of categories is to permit rich inductive inferences. Prior work shows that children use category labels to guide their inductive inferences. However, there are competing theories to explain this phenomenon, differing in the roles attributed to conceptual information vs. perceptual similarity. Seven experiments with 4- to…

This article presents the author's response to Paul E. Newton's paper titled "Clarifying the Consensus Definition of Validity" ("Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives," 2012). Newton's paper offers an interesting and constructive discussion about how people think about validity. In this reaction, the author comments on some of…

Learning is often identified with the acquisition, encoding, or construction of new knowledge, while retrieval is often considered only a means of assessing knowledge, not a process that contributes to learning. Here, we make the case that retrieval is the key process for understanding and for promoting learning. We provide an overview of recent…

Purpose: Many children with communication disorders have reading comprehension difficulties, and in order to target interventions effectively it is important to identify which specific components of comprehension are especially challenging. The current study explored the relationship between text-inferencing skill, autistic symptomatology, and…

The slow uptake of Education for Sustainability (EfS) curricula in universities has, partly, been attributed to academics' perceptions that EfS has little relevance within some disciplines. Understanding teaching academics' attitudes, values and experiences of EfS across disciplines can inform future EfS efforts in higher education. This paper…

The purpose of this study was to measure decision-making influences within RtI teams. The study examined the factors that influence school personnel involved in three areas of RtI: determining which RtI measures and tools teams select and implement (i.e. Measures and Tools), evaluating the data-driven decisions that are made based on the…

Most questions in social and biomedical sciences are causal in nature: what would happen to individuals, or to groups, if part of their environment were changed? In this groundbreaking text, two world-renowned experts present statistical methods for studying such questions. This book starts with the notion of potential outcomes, each corresponding…

In the social sciences, estimating causal effects is particularly difficult. Gold standards are set by randomized experiments in many cases expensive, unenforceable for ethical and practical reasons. Recent research has drawn attention to techniques that under some conditions, could estimate causal effects on non-experimental observable data. One…

The current research aims to investigate the serial-multiple mediation of general belongingness and life satisfaction in the relationship between loneliness and attachment to parents and peers in adolescents. The participants of the research consisted of 218 high school students (F = 126, 57.8%; M = 92, 42.2%). Age of the participants' ranged…