What does it mean to compare sets of objects along a scale, for example by saying "the men are taller than the women"? We explore comparison of pluralities in two experiments, eliciting comparison judgments while varying the properties of the members of each set. We find that a plurality is judged as "bigger" when the mean size of its members is…

The inspiration for this paper comes from a successful experiment conducted with students in the "Mobile Robots" course in the fifth year of the integrated Master's program in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP), Porto, Portugal. One of the topics in this Mobile Robots…

Aim: We aimed to explore the organization of the calendar knowledge base underlying date calculation by assessing the ability of savant calendar calculators to free recall a series of date lists. Method: Four experiments are reported that assessed recall of structural and non-structural features of the calendar in eight savant calendar calculators…

The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to examine whether high level information affects preview benefit during Chinese reading. In two experiments, readers read sentences with a 1-character target word while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, the semantic relatedness between the target word and the preview word was…

Children had to choose one of two urns--each comprising beads of winning and losing colours--from which to draw a winning bead. Three experiments, aimed at diagnosing rules of choice and designed without confounding possible rules with each other, were conducted. The level of arithmetic difficulty of the trials was controlled so as not to distort…

Three structural priming experiments investigated how monotransitive and intransitive structures are represented. Experiment 1 showed that priming from intransitives was stronger when the verb was the same in prime and target than when it was different, but monotransitive priming was unaffected by verb repetition. We argue that the activation of…

The use of narratives in making oneself known to others has various political and ethical aims. Narrative is considered to be effective in revealing the particular knowledge of differently positioned persons that have been subjugated. It is hoped that through these subjects' representations of their differently situated lives and selves, dominant…

Eye and head movements evoked in response to obvious visual attention shifts. However, there has been little progress on the causes of absent-mindedness so far. The paper proposes an attention awareness system that captures the conditions regarding the interaction of eye gaze and head pose under various attentional switching in computer classroom.…

This article describes an artistic inquiry conducted by two art therapists using a dialogic method of collage and letter writing over a period of 4 weeks. The goal of the project was to broaden understanding of arts-based research and to discover the properties of collage as a research practice in art therapy. A thematic analysis of the visual and…

Upon hearing a novel word, language learners must identify its correct meaning from a diverse set of situationally relevant options. Such referential ambiguity could be reduced through "repetitive" exposure to the novel word across diverging learning situations, a learning mechanism referred to as "cross-situational learning."…

Psychological research has documented again and again marked performance decrements whenever humans perform 2 or more tasks at the same time. In fact, the available evidence seems to suggest that any type of behavior is subject to such limitations. The present experiments employed the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm to identify a…

The Remember/Know procedure, developed by Tulving (1985) to capture the distinction between the conscious correlates of episodic and semantic retrieval, has spawned considerable research and debate. However, only a handful of reports have examined the recognition content beyond this dichotomous simplification. To address this, we collected…

The aim of this study is to analyse the effect of tasks on the detection of explanation obstacles when secondary school students read scientific texts. Students were instructed to read short passages under different task conditions, and to ask questions if necessary. Obstacle detection was operationalised in terms of the type of questions asked by…

An experiment involving 90 students in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades investigated how visual examples and grade (our surrogate for age) affected variability in a drawing task. The task involved using circles as the main element in a set of drawings. There were two examples: One was simple and single (a smiley face inside a circle); the other,…

Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to…