To succeed in STEM, students need to learn to use visual representations. Most prior research has focused on conceptual knowledge about visual representations that is acquired via verbally mediated forms of learning. However, students also need perceptual fluency: the ability to rapidly and effortlessly translate among representations. Perceptual…

As Barry Brummett (1984) has argued, the purpose of rhetorical theory is pedagogical--providing students with resources for understanding the rhetorical transactions that they encounter every day. An understanding of the implications of ideology is necessary for advanced communication students. Kellner and Share (2005) contend that this is…

The practice of using images in teaching is widespread, and in science education images are used so extensively that some have argued they are now the "main vehicle of communication" (C. Ferreira, A. Arroio "Problems Educ. 21st Century" 2009, 16, 48-53). Although this phenomenon is especially notable in the field of…

Part representation is not only critical to object perception but also plays a key role in a number of basic visual cognition functions, such as figure-ground segregation, allocation of attention, and memory for shapes. Yet, virtually nothing is known about the development of part representation. If parts are fundamental components of object shape…

ASD subjects are described as showing particular difficulty in decoding emotional patterns. This paper explored linguistic and conceptual skills in response to emotional stimuli presented as emotional faces, scripts (pictures) and interactive situations (videos). Participants with autism, Asperger syndrome and control participants were shown…

We study the misconceptions about colour that most people hold, determining the general phenomenological laws that govern them. Concept mapping was used to combat the misconceptions which were found in the application of a test specifically designed to determine these misconceptions, while avoiding the possible misleading inductions that could…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

Three groups of Nigerian high school and college students were tested for response to four pictorial depth cues. Students had more difficulty with cues concerning the relative size of objects and the foreshortening of straight lines than with cues involving overlap of lines and distortion of the angles between lines. (Author/JEG)

This study investigated whether object-picture discrepancy occurs because preschool children regard pictures as significates rather than as signifiers. Results indicated the children did not consistently respond to objects and their pictorial representations equivalently. (Author/DB)

Two design strategies were tested on 69 elementary school children to investigate (1) the effect of using three types of pictorial supports to focus student attention on the important features of a concept or rule, and (2) the importance of specific pretraining instruction on using the pictorial to notice and label relevant rules and concepts.…

This study of the effects of practice on children's perceptual judgments investigates the validity of the distinctive features hypothesis and the schemata hypothesis by comparing performance on discrimination tasks using familiar stimuli (letters of the alphabet) with a variety of transformations held constant over four massed practice conditions.…

Designed to determine the effects of multiple and linear imagery on performance of a visual location task, this study also considered whether scores on such a task were affected by the interaction of presentation mode (multiple and linear imagery) and perceptual type (haptic and visual). (Author/JEG)

To relate scientific evidence with subjective interpretations relevant to the construction and appreciation of visual images, this paper reviews the literature pertinent to the processes involving the perception of visual images, the distinct functions of the left and right hemispheres of the human brain in recording and interpreting visual data,…

A media attribute approach was used in a study which hypothesized that compositional syntactic placement may bridge the processing link between the learner's cognitive capacity and the demands of a simple concept attainment task. Compositional syntactic placement refers to the relative horizontal position of the primary symbol or object within a…

This study was designed as a first attempt to study the relationship of learning style, perception, and performance to computer based instruction (CBI). First the relationship of two dimensions of cognitive styles, field independence-field dependence (FI-FD) and preferred perceptual mode (verbal-visual) was studied. Second, the main and…