Eye tracking research technologies are often used to study how individuals attend visually to different types of AAC displays (e.g. visual scene displays, grid displays). The assumption is that efficiency of visual search may relate to efficiency of motor selection necessary for communication via aided AAC; however, this assumption has not…

It has been suggested that attenuated adaptation to visual stimuli in autism is the result of atypical perceptual priors (e.g., Pellicano and Burr in "Trends Cogn Sci" 16(10):504-510, 2012. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009). This study investigated adaptation to color in autistic adults, measuring both strength of afterimage and the…

Executive functions (EFs) are an umbrella term that includes various cognitive abilities (such as inhibition, planning, goal-setting, monitoring, and shifting). There is common agreement that there are three main EFs: inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Further studies have reported that compared to typically developing…

In order to extract the regularities underlying a continuous sensory input, the individual elements constituting the stream have to be encoded and their transitional probabilities (TPs) should be learned. This suggests that variance in statistical learning (SL) performance reflects efficiency in encoding representations as well as efficiency in…

This paper presents initial findings from a project that explored the use of digital cameras by preschool children in classroom science investigations. Children's science experience was viewed through a multimodal, social semiotic lens. A qualitative approach to data analysis was used to track and codify the visual choices made by the child…

Parents support and scaffold more mature behaviors in their infants. Recent research suggests that parent-infant joint visual attention may scaffold the development of sustained attention by extending the duration of an infant's attention to an object. The open question concerns the parent behaviors that occur within joint-attention episodes and…

Music reading is a central part of most band programs, yet research about music reading has rarely included articulation markings. The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of four experimental practice conditions to a control condition on woodwind players' performance of slur, accent, and staccato markings. A secondary purpose was to…

Prior eye-tracking studies involving autistic individuals have focused on total looking time or proportion of looking time to key regions of interest. These studies have not examined another important feature, the ability to sustain attention to stimuli. In particular, the ability to sustain attention to a dynamic social stimulus might reflect…

This work is based on previous studies showing that a short conversational intervention (SCI) focusing on the causes of the story events is effective in promoting the causal and mental content of children's narratives. In these studies, however, not all the children improved their narratives after the SCI). The present study examined individual…

Young children increasingly interact with technological devices, either as a form of entertainment or for educational purposes. This research sought to investigate the early symbolic understanding of an interactive, three-dimensional digital image presented on a tablet. Two studies were designed in which the children had to use the image as a…

From early in life, infants synchronize with others on a physiological level, a process thought to underlie social connections and group cohesion. This synchronization is seen, for example, when their pupils dilate in response to observing another person with dilated pupils -- known as "pupillary contagion." There is mixed evidence on…

There are two lines of discussion regarding the function of the Approximate Number System (ANS). The first line focuses on the extent to which visual cues affect the estimation of numerosity. The second line investigates the extent to which ANS precision is associated with symbolic math performance. The current study combined these two lines of…

Recent studies have found that infants show relational learning in the first year. Like older children, they can abstract relations such as "same" or "different" across a series of exemplars. For older children, language has a major impact on relational learning: labeling a shared relation facilitates learning, while labeling…

This study examined the changes in saccadic amplitude associated with learning a visual sequence. The oculomotor system gradually adjusts saccadic parameters when tracking a visual stimulus, which has a predictable trajectory. In these contexts, the change in saccadic amplitudes leads to predictive fixations. That is, fixations made to a position…

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we…