Three experiments examined kindergartners' and second graders' retention in the context of two distinctiveness manipulations, the von Restorff and bizarre imagery paradigms. Results showed that: older children retained more information from lists of pictures or interactive images over 3 weeks than younger; younger children failed to benefit from…

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…

Three experiments explored 5- and 7-month-olds' intermodal coordination of proprioceptive information produced by leg movements and visual movement information specifying these same motions. Results suggested that coordination of visual and proprioceptive inputs is constrained by infants' information processing of the displays and have…

Responds to Needham and Baillargeon's criticisms and offers an alternative resolution of the conflicting results between the laboratories regarding abilities of infants less than 12 months to use property/featural information for object individuation. Maintains that kind concepts are acquired as infants approach their first birthday and that…

Examines the vocabulary and communication constructs that are used by novices and domain experts to describe objects in an object identification task. Results suggest that indexing and retrieval systems should provide semantic level similarity mechanisms to allow for whole-object as well as part-wise visual analogy. The systems should also provide…

Investigates the information representation power of different modalities in the video data in order to collect empirical evidence for video surrogate creation and thus better support effective video browsing and information retrieval. Three types of video surrogates were created and compared under two user tasks--verbal comprehension and visual…

Maintains that visually enhanced musical performances provide an exciting and creative aspect of musical production. Explains that the conductor should choose a musical selection that offers concrete visual opportunities, focus on visual images, choose video excerpts, and use dance if possible. Finds that many visual techniques used by marching…

There is much debate as to the extent and nature of functional specialization within the different subregions of the prefrontal cortex. The current study was undertaken to investigate the effect of damage to medial prefrontal cortex subregions in the rat. Rats were trained on two biconditional discrimination tasks, one auditory and one visual, in…

In this article, the author discusses how to improve a child's motor skills through listening by using three simple steps--recording the auditory model, determining when to use the auditory model, and considering where to use the auditory model. She points out the importance of using a demonstration technique that helps learners understand the…

A single heartbeat is a complicated process. In Dutch upper secondary biology textbooks this process is illustrated by the classical Wiggers diagram, which usually shows different heart-related quantities, like voltage (ECG), blood pressure, and the heart sounds. It may help students to understand the nature of the Wiggers diagram if they perform…

The colourful, vigorous territorial display behaviour of the Siamese fighting fish, "Betta splendens", has great appeal for both pet enthusiasts and animal behaviourists. Their beauty, longevity, easy maintenance and rearing make them a popular pet and an ideal science laboratory specimen. This investigation utilises "B. splendens" to test for the…

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate attention orienting triggered by another's gaze direction in autism. Method: Twelve high-functioning children with autism and gender- and age-matched normal control children were studied using two tasks. In the first task, children were asked to detect laterally presented target stimuli preceded…

The "visual world paradigm" typically involves presenting participants with a visual scene and recording eye movements as they either hear an instruction to manipulate objects in the scene or as they listen to a description of what may happen to those objects. In this study, participants heard each target sentence only after the corresponding…

Studies have suggested attention-free semantic processing of natural scenes in which concurrent tasks leave category detection unimpaired (e.g., F. Li, R. VanRullen, C. Koch, & P. Perona, 2002). Could this ability reflect detection of disjunctive feature sets rather than high-level binding? Participants detected an animal target in a rapid serial…

Arguments about the existence of language-specific neural systems and specifically about the independence of syntactic and semantic processing have focused on the event-related brain measures (ERPs) as tool to monitoring moment-by-moment the cognitive processes underlaid. In the present experiments, the available evidence indicates that the ERP…