Viewers' attentional selection while looking at scenes is affected by both top-down and bottom-up factors. However, when watching film, viewers typically attend to the movie similarly irrespective of top-down factors--a phenomenon we call the "tyranny of film." A key difference between still pictures and film is that film contains…

Recent work has investigated the origin of infant colour categories, showing pre-linguistic infants categorise colour even in the absence of colour words. These infant categories are similar but not identical to adult categories, giving rise to an important question about how infant colour perception changes with the learning of colour words. Here…

Purpose: The use of sign-supported speech (SSS) in the education of deaf students has been recently discussed in relation to its usefulness with deaf children using cochlear implants. To clarify the benefits of SSS for comprehension, 2 eye-tracking experiments aimed to detect the extent to which signs are actively processed in this mode of…

Coviewing is a commonly recommended practice, but little is known about how coviewing impacts children's educational media viewing experience. We investigated how coviewing impacts attention and comprehension of educational media, as well as the role of baseline vocabulary in understanding these associations. Eighty-three preschoolers viewed two…

When children interpret spoken language in real time, linguistic information drives rapid shifts in visual attention to objects in the visual world. This language-vision interaction can provide insights into children's developing efficiency in language comprehension. But how does language influence visual attention when the linguistic signal and…

Research (Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005) suggests systematic patterns in how young children visually attend to storybooks. However, these studies have not addressed whether visual attention is predictive of children's storybook comprehension. In the current study, we used eye-tracking methodology to examine two-year-olds' visual attention while…

The main purpose of this research was to investigate how Taiwanese grade 6 readers selected and used information from different print (main text, headings, captions) and visual elements (decorational, representational, interpretational) to comprehend a science text through tracking their eye movement behaviors. Six grade 6 students read a double…

The present study investigated (a) whether the perceived cognitive load was different when geometry problems with various levels of configuration comprehension were solved and (b) whether eye movements in comprehending geometry problems showed sources of cognitive loads. In the first investigation, three characteristics of geometry configurations…

Cantonese shape classifiers encode perceptual information that is characteristic of their associated nouns, although certain nouns are exceptional. For example, the classifier "tiu" occurs primarily with nouns for long-narrow-flexible objects (e.g., scarves, snakes, and ropes) and also occurs with the noun for a (short, rigid) key. In 3…

This dissertation examines the cognitive processes individuals use when reading organic chemistry equations and factors that affect these processes, namely, visual complexity of chemical equations and participant characteristics (expertise, spatial ability, and working memory capacity). A six stage process model for the comprehension of organic…

Empirical evidence demonstrating that sentence meaning is rapidly reconciled with the visual environment has been broadly construed as supporting the seamless interaction of visual and linguistic representations during situated comprehension. Based on recent behavioral and neuroscientific findings, however, we argue for the more deeply rooted…

Uses and limitations of eye-movement records as measures of reading performance are discussed. Research studies and findings are cited, standards for reliability and validity are given, and types of eye-movement measures are described. Research has demonstrated that eye movements are not causes but symptoms of reading proficiency; therefore,…

When participants follow spoken instructions to pick up and move objects in a visual workspace, their eye movements to the objects are closely time-locked to referential expressions in the instructions. Two experiments used this methodology to investigate the processing of the temporary ambiguities that arise because spoken language unfolds over…

UNDER THE DIRECTION OF PROFESSOR BRUNER, THE CENTER FOR COGNITIVE STUDIES AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY HAS CARRIED OUT A SERIES OF STUDIES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION. THERE HAVE BEEN OVER 30 EXPERIMENTS ON THE GROWTH OF PERCEPTION, PROBLEM-SOLVING, AND REASONING BETWEEN THE AGES OF 3 AND 10, IN PURSUIT OF A THEORY TO ACCOUNT FOR THE CHANGES IN…