This study aims to determine whether team production among peer groups culturally aggregated can affect the individual student performance in an Italian university. Two further hypotheses were tested in order to verify whether students perform better in team than individually and if students culturally aggregated in team perform better than…

A recent study has shown that congenitally blind adults, who have never had visual experience, are impaired on an auditory spatial bisection task (Gori, Sandini, Martinoli, & Burr, 2014). In this study we investigated how thresholds for auditory spatial bisection and auditory discrimination develop with age in sighted and congenitally blind…

Today's students enter engineering colleges with different technical backgrounds and prior graphics experience. This may due to their high school of provenience, which can be technical or non-technical. The prior experience affects students' ability in learning and hence their motivation and self-efficacy beliefs. This study intended to evaluate…

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects…

Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assignment of lexical stress is unpredictable. Sensitivity to stress neighborhood information was investigated by constructing three types of three-syllabic nonwords: nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of dominant stress words (dominant), nonwords with…

We investigated the presence and the characteristics of the Simon effect for onset and offset targets when these stimuli are randomly intermixed. In Experiment 1, two possible target locations were occupied by an occluder. On onset trials, a target appeared above an occluder, while on offset trials one of the occluders disappeared, revealing the…

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of…

Dual-process theories have been proposed to explain normative and heuristic responses to reasoning and decision-making problems. Standard unitary and dual-process theories predict that normative responses should increase with age. However, research has focused recently on exceptions to this standard pattern, including developmental increases in…

We investigated the role of number agreement on verb and of animacy in the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in 51 monolingual Italian-speaking children, mean age 9:33, tested through a self-paced listening experiment with a final comprehension question. A "digit span test" and a "listening span test" were…

In 4 experiments, we intermixed trials in which the stimulus color was relevant with trials where participants had to judge the stimulus shape or parity and found that the logical-recoding rule (Hedge & Marsh, 1975) applied to the relevant dimension in a task can generalize to the irrelevant dimension of the other task. The mapping…

The aim of this study is to investigate whether newborns detect a face on the basis of a Gestalt representation based on first-order relational information (i.e., the basic arrangement of face features) by using Mooney stimuli. The incomplete 2-tone Mooney stimuli were used because they preclude focusing both on the local features (i.e., the fine…

In this article, the authors investigated unimodal and cross-modal processes in spatial working memory. A number of locations had to be memorized within visual or haptic matrices according to different experimental conditions known to be critical in accounting for the effects of perception on imagery. Results reveal that some characteristics of…

This report is part of a long-term research on the construction of mathematical meanings through the interaction with various technologies. The research involved a set of teaching experiments based on body motion with sensors and calculators at different school levels, from kindergarten to secondary school. Here I refer to the one developed in a…

The Aplusix system has been designed for helping students to learn algebra. Its capacity to tell the students whether their calculations are correct or not, to provide families of exercises of a chosen level, and to give scores after tests allows this system to be used in the regular functioning of the class. Its capacity to record the students'…

Assuming that dynamic features of Dynamic Geometry Software may provide a basic representation of both variation and functional dependency, and taking Vygotskian perspective of semiotic mediation, a teaching experiment has been designed with the aim of introducing pupils to the idea of function. First data coming from the observations in Italian…