Ancient as well as modern writers have promoted the idea that bizarre images enhance memory. Research has documented bizarreness effects, with one standard technique finding that sentences describing unusual, implausible, or bizarre scenarios are better remembered than sentences describing plausible, every day, or common scenarios. Not…

Visual expertise is a fundamental proficiency in many vocations and many questions have risen on the topic, with studies looking at experts and novices differences' in observation (e.g., radiologists) or at ways to help novices achieve visual expertise (e.g., through annotations). However, most of these studies focus on white-collar professions…

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…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…

Study stimuli presented at the same time as unrelated targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli presented with distractors. This attentional boost effect (ABE) has been found with pictorial (Swallow & Jiang, 2010) and more recently verbal materials (Spataro, Mulligan, & Rossi-Arnaud, 2013). The present experiments…

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based…

In two behavioral experiments involving lateralized stimulus presentation, we tested whether one of the most commonly used measures of holistic face processing--the composite face effect--would be more pronounced for stimuli presented to the right as compared to the left hemisphere. In experiment 1, we investigated the composite face effect in a…

An increasing number of studies has investigated the latent factor structure of executive functions. Some studies found a three-factor structure of inhibition, shifting, and updating, but others could not replicate this finding. We assumed that the task choices and scoring methods might be responsible for these contradictory findings. Therefore,…

Working memory, inhibition and naming speed was assessed in 22 children with mathematical learning disorders (MD), 17 children with a reading learning disorder (RD), and 45 children without any learning problems between 8 and 12 years old. All subjects with learning disorders performed poorly on working memory tasks, providing evidence that they…

We show that perceptual sensitivity to visual stimuli can be modulated by matches between the contents of working memory (WM) and stimuli in the visual field. Observers were presented with an object cue (to hold in WM or to merely attend) and subsequently had to identify a brief target presented within a colored shape. The cue could be…

We previously reported a meta-analysis of explicit memory studies in populations with intellectual disability (ID). The current study discusses the educational implications of this meta-analysis. The main factors at the core of these implications can be divided into two categories: those related to task characteristics (e.g., depth of processing,…

Children with autism have been shown to be less susceptible to Kanisza type contour illusions than children without autism (Happe, 1996). Other authors have suggested that this finding could be explained by the fact that participants with autism were required to make a potentially ambiguous verbal response which may have masked whether or not they…

We investigated the effects of transparent fraction names on children's reasoning about fractions. U.S. and Korean first and second graders were tested using verbal and nonverbal measures. On a verbal task, Korean students were worse at interpreting their own conventional fraction names than interpreting modified terms with a more familiar word…

A study investigated whether 32 adolescents with reading disabilities (RD) were slower at processing visual information compared to children of comparable age and reading level, or whether their deficit was specific to the written word. Adolescents with RD demonstrated difficulties in processing rapidly presented verbal and nonverbal visual…