Since Broca's studies on language processing, cortical functional specialization has been considered to be integral to efficient neural processing. A fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the type of learning that is required for functional specialization to develop. To address this issue with respect to the development of neural…

The purpose of this study was to see whether different types of background music affect the performance of a reading comprehension task in Taiwanese college students. There are two major research questions in this study. First, this study tries to find out whether listening to music affect the learner's concentration when they are doing a task…

Though auditory pitch is customarily mapped in Western cultures onto spatial verticality (high-low), both anthropological reports and cognitive studies suggest that pitch may be mapped onto a wide variety of other domains. We collected a total number of 35 pitch mappings and investigated in four experiments how these mappings are used and…

In spite of continuing patterning of curriculum subject preference and choice by gender, there has been little recent attention to the argument developed in the 1970s that children play with different toys according to their gender, and that these provide girls and boys with (different) curriculum-related skills. The article describes a…

Five children with visual impairments received instruction in drawing, using ink and wash painting and calligraphy techniques. A special system developed by a blind Taiwanese Chinese calligrapher, Tsann-Cherng Liaw, was used to help the children orient and refine their work. Children's performance on simple drawing tasks was compared before and…

Recent research has looked at whether the expectancy of an emotion can account for subsequent valence specific laterality effects of prosodic emotion, though no research has examined this effect for facial emotion. In the study here (n = 58), we investigated this issue using two tasks; an emotional face perception task and a novel word task that…

Evidence supporting Problem-based learning (PBL) fostering students' self-directed learning (SDL) in hybrid PBL curricula is inconsistent. To explore the influence of PBL in a hybrid curriculum on students' SDL, the authors investigated the following: (1) students' self-assessed SDL ability, (2) students' perceptions of the influence of curricular…

Self-care for clinicians is much needed. To discover ways to implement self-care into our lives, we (four therapists) tried different self-care methods over a span of one to two weeks. After using practices that explored self-care through mindfulness meditation, autohypnosis, music, and spirituality, we wrote about the outcome of these experiences…

Electrophysiological work in nonhuman primates has established the existence of multiple types of signals in the temporal lobe that contribute to recognition memory, including information regarding a stimulus's relative novelty, familiarity, and recency of occurrence. We used high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether young…

For 8-year-old Josh Greiner, the old cliche that music is a universal language has new meaning. As he adapts to a world where being non-verbal sometimes makes it hard to fit in, Josh is coming to understand the power of a song to break everyday communication barriers and provide motivation to try things. Music has always been a part of his daily…

The aim of this qualitative study is to understand the prerequisites for learning organisations (LO) as perceived by university students. Intrapreneurship education offers possibilities to increase student's adaptation of learning organisation's climate and behaviour. By analysing students' perceptions, more information about learning organisation…

Individuals working with young children, birth through age five, continue to strive for professional recognition. Factors that contribute to a person's feelings about being a child care professional were investigated. Stratified random sampling was used for data collection. Participants in the study responded to mailed questionnaires concerning a…

One of the largest challenges of teaching astronomy is bringing the infinite scale of the universe into the four walls of a classroom. However, concepts of astronomy are often the most interesting to students. This article focuses on an alternative method for learning about stars by exploring visible characteristics of the constellation Orion and…

In the new digital and knowledge society, education is facing great challenges in transitioning from traditional ways of instruction and learning toward more innovative approaches. It also raises great demands for the transformation of the teacher role from that of the traditional knowledge transmitter to a new stance. This article focuses on the…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2003) work on metarepresentational competence in mathematics and sciences as theoretical and empirical background, it aims to assess children's criteria for representational adequacy of graphical…