Museum learning is beneficial for social inclusion, deepening partnerships between schools and museums, and increasing levels of pupil attainment. While there have been numerous empirical studies on the use of haptics in formal educational settings, few have explored the effect of haptic interaction on learning outcomes in museum learning. This…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

The aim of the present study was to explore the learning usability factors of 3D modeling in virtual reality environment (VRE). Users' 3D modeling usability factors in VR were investigated through principal component analysis (PCA). Fifty industrial design students participated in the 3D modeling learning in VR experience experiment, and their…

The present study investigated how the eye contact perception of ingroup and outgroup faces by Japanese adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder differed from that of age-, sex-, and IQ-matched typically developing individuals. The autism spectrum disorder and typically developing individuals were equally likely to perceive subtly…

Dyslexic individuals have serious difficulties in learning to read, and several software programs have been developed to overcome them. Previous research studies found that in most cases, providing correct spelling and word recognition with greater accuracy constitutes the key function. However, more research has to be conducted on the software…

Knowledge about how characters are written has been argued to play a particularly important role in how children learn to read Chinese. In the current study, we investigate the role that knowledge about writing characters plays in visual word processing in skilled adult readers. While there is clear neuropsychological evidence against the strong…

We examined the perception of an ambiguous squares stimulus evoking bistable perception in a sample of 31 individuals with autistic spectrum condition and 22 matched typical adults. The perception of the ambiguous figure was manipulated by adaptation to unambiguous figures and/or by placing the ambiguous figure into a context of unambiguous…

Detecting where our partners direct their gaze is an important aspect of social interaction. An atypical gaze processing has been reported in autism. However, it remains controversial whether children and adults with autism spectrum disorder interpret indirect gaze direction with typical accuracy. This study investigated whether the detection of…

The size congruity effect (SiCE) shows that number and physical size interact as magnitudes. That is, response times are faster when number and size are congruent (e.g., 2 4) than when they are incongruent (e.g., 2 4). A shared representational system has been the most influential account for the SiCE. Recently, this account has been challenged by…

It has been suggested that the sensory symptoms which affect many people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) may be related to alterations in multisensory processing. Typically, the likelihood of interactions between the senses increases when information is temporally and spatially coincident. We explored visual-tactile interactions in adults…

The present study investigated whether learning how to use a web service with an interactive tutorial can be enhanced by cueing. We expected the attentional guidance provided by visual cues to facilitate the selection of information in static screen displays that corresponded to spoken explanations. Unlike most previous studies in this area, we…

Our visual system is highly sensitive to regularities in the environment. Locations that were important in one's previous experience are often prioritized during search, even though observers may not be aware of the learning. In this study we characterized the guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning of a target's spatial probability,…

Mental rotation is an important spatial processing ability and an important element in intelligence tests. However, the majority of past attempts at training mental rotation have used paper-and-pencil tests or digital images. This study proposes an innovative mental rotation training approach using magnetic motion controllers to allow learners to…

The information visualization pipeline serves as a lossy communication channel for presentation of data on a screen-space of limited resolution. The lossy communication is not just a machine-only phenomenon due to information loss caused by translation of data, but also a reflection of the degree to which the human user can comprehend visual…

The interaction between redundant geometric and featural cues in open field search tasks has been examined widely with results that are not always consistent. Cheng (1986) found evidence that when searching for food in rectangular environments, rats used the geometrical characteristics of the environment rather than local featural cues, suggesting…