Our aim was to investigate perceptual attunement (PA) in vowel perception of Dutch-learning infants (6-8-10-month-olds) using the hybrid visual fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007). Infants were habituated to one phoneme and subsequently tested on items in which a token of the habituated phoneme alternated with either another token of the same…

Serious games have a great potential to help people developing new skills or improving previously existing ones. Deaf and blind community face considerable challenges and difficulties regarding to the acquisition of skills in literacy. The design of serious games to meet the needs of the target groups where the deaf and blind people are struggling…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to test whether a group of older postlingually deafened cochlear implant users (OCIs) use similar verbal memory strategies to those used by older normal-hearing adults (ONHs). Verbal memory functioning was assessed in the visual and auditory modalities separately, enabling us to eliminate possible modality-based…

Today's scientific texts are complex and multimodal. Due to new technology, the number of images is increasing, as is their diversity and complexity. Interaction with complex texts and visualizations becomes a challenge. How can we help readers and learners achieve multimodal literacy? We use data from the audio description of a popular scientific…

Reading in alphabetic orthography requires analysis and recognition of specific attributes of visual stimuli, and generation, reactivation, and use of mental images of letters and words. This study evaluated the role of visual analysis and mental imagery in reading performances of students at different stages of reading acquisition. Reading…

Understanding the relationship between cognitive processing and learner performance on tasks using digital media has become increasingly important as the transition towards online learning programs increases. Determining the impact of implementation of instructional resources is often limited to performance outcomes and comparisons to the status…

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left-to-right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is…

Despite growing recognition of the importance of visual representations to science education, previous research has given attention mostly to verbal modalities of evolution instruction. Visual aspects of classroom learning of evolution are yet to be systematically examined by science educators. The present study attends to this issue by exploring…

It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual…

Purpose: Although lexical information influences phoneme perception, the extent to which reliance on lexical information enhances speech processing in challenging listening environments is unclear. We examined the extent to which individual differences in lexical influences on phonemic processing impact speech processing in maskers containing…

Although many researchers theorize that primitive numerosity processing abilities may lay the foundation for whole number concepts, other classes of numbers, like fractions, are sometimes assumed to be inaccessible to primitive architectures. This research presents evidence that the automatic processing of nonsymbolic magnitudes affects processing…

An important yet unresolved question regarding visual working memory (VWM) relates to whether or not binding processes within VWM require additional attentional resources compared with processing solely the individual components comprising these bindings. Previous findings indicate that binding of surface features (e.g., colored shapes) within VWM…

In 2 experiments, participants were presented with lists of between 2 and 12 words for either immediate free recall (IFR) or immediate serial recall (ISR). Auditory recall advantages at the end of the list (modality effects) and visual recall advantages early in the list (inverse modality effects) were observed in both tasks and the extent and…

"In many ways, images are the vehicle of comprehension, thought, and action. We integrate parts of images, we remember images, we manipulate images." This quote from James E. Zull clarifies the rationale for a discussion protocol called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), in which teachers focus students' attention on an image and ask…

Problem solving is one of the main competences we seek to teach students at school for use in their future lives. However, when dealing with mathematical problems, teachers encounter a wide variety of difficulties. To foster students' problem-solving skills, the authors developed "strategy keys." Strategy keys can serve as material to…