Academics preparing students for experiential placements within professional programs require considerable curriculum planning and pedagogical expertise. Communities of practice involving workshops and online processes provide opportunities for collaborative work in developing quality curriculum materials and also in supporting widespread…

In this study, 13 individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA), 15 individuals with Asperger's disorder (AD), and age-, and IQ-matched controls were presented a list of sentences auditorily. Participants then evaluated semantically related but new sentences and reported whether they were old or new. The total rates of false recognition for…

Background: Interpreting emotional expressions is a socio-cognitive skill central to interpersonal interaction. Poor emotion recognition has been reported in autism but is less well understood in other kinds of intellectual disabilities (ID), with procedural differences making comparisons across studies and syndromes difficult. This study aimed to…

Do the viewpoint costs incurred when naming rotated familiar objects arise during initial identification or during consolidation? To answer this question we employed an attentional blink (AB) task where two target objects appeared amongst a rapid stream of distractor objects. Our assumption was that while both targets and distractors undergo…

The aim of this study was to identify promising endophenotypes for intelligence in children and adolescents for future genetic studies in cognitive development. Based on the available set of endophenotypes for intelligence in adults, cognitive tasks were chosen covering the domains of working memory, processing speed, and selective attention. This…

When bisecting words in their middle, people reveal leftward bisection errors. This tendency might emerge from an attentional bias towards the beginning of the word. However, when longer meaningless letter strings are presented, people reveal a rightward bisection bias. To test the role of semantic information on leftward or rightward bisection…

One of the components of abnormal social functioning in autism is an impaired ability to direct eye gaze onto other people's faces in social situations. Here, we investigated the relationship between gaze onto the eye and mouth regions of faces, and the visual information that was present within those regions. We used the "Bubbles" method to vary…

Poor readers perform worse than their normal reading peers on a variety of speech perception tasks, which may be linked to their phonological processing abilities. The purpose of the study was to compare the brain activation patterns of normal and impaired readers on speech perception to better understand the phonological basis in reading…

Research investigating risk perception suggests that not only the quantitative parameters used in technical risk assessment (i.e., frequency and severity of harm) but also "qualitative" aspects such as the dread a hazard provokes or its controllability influence risk judgments. It remains to be elucidated, however, which neural mechanism underlie…

The purpose of this research was to assess the development of phonological skills before and during learning to read. Thirty-four children were tested twice, in nursery school and in first grade with an epiphonological task (E), e.g. judgment of similarity, and two metaphonological tasks, one requiring the extraction of common units (M1) and one…

Empirical research shows that students often use reasoning founded on copying algorithms or recalling facts (imitative reasoning) when solving mathematical tasks. Research also indicate that a focus on this type of reasoning might weaken the students' understanding of the underlying mathematical concepts. It is therefore important to study the…

We examined phonological priming in illiterate adults, using a cross-modal picture-word interference task. Participants named pictures while hearing distractor words at different Stimulus Onset Asynchronies (SOAs). Ex-illiterates and university students were also tested. We specifically assessed the ability of the three populations to use…

Three experiments were conducted to test the phonological recoding hypothesis in visual word recognition. Most studies on this issue have been conducted using mono-syllabic words, eventually constructing various models of phonological processing. Yet in many languages including English, the majority of words are multi-syllabic words. English…

We investigated the effects of different amounts of distraction on preschoolers' task performance and attention. Children 3.5 and 4 years of age completed problem-solving tasks in one of three conditions: no distraction, intermittent (periodic) distraction, or continuous distraction. The results revealed differential effects of the distractors at…

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure…