This paper describes the use of activity theory to compare dissimilar cases in a study of adult online music learners. The purpose of the study was to better understand the barriers that keep self-motivated users of online open education resources from experiencing successful independent learning. Eleven participants were given tutoring-style help…

Emotional stimuli often capture attention and disrupt effortful cognitive processing. However, cognitive processes vary in the degree to which they require effort. We investigated the impact of emotional pictures on visual search and on automatic priming of search. Observers performed visual search after task-irrelevant neutral or emotionally…

The visual front-end of reading is most often associated with orthographic processing. The left ventral occipito-temporal cortex seems to be preferentially tuned for letter string and word processing. In contrast, little is known of the mechanisms responsible for pre-orthographic processing: the processing of character strings regardless of…