This study compares two methods of instruction in practical school biology. The content remains the same but two teaching methods are used, one based on workstations (Group 1) and the other a conventional approach (Group 2). The content was a regular 9th grade syllabus issue: visual perception. Method 1 included a phenomenological introduction,…

Studying the biological mechanisms underlying mental retardation and developmental disabilities (MR/DD) is a very complex task. This is due to the wide heterogeneity of etiologies and pathways that lead to MR/DD. Breakthroughs in genetics and molecular biology and the development of sophisticated brain imaging techniques during the last decades…

The author studied children's and young adult's perceptions of facial age and beliefs about the sociability, cognitive ability, and physical fitness of adult faces. From pairs of photographs of adult faces, participants (4-6 years old, 8-10 years old, 13-16 years old, and 19-23 years old) selected the one face that appeared younger, older, better…

To examine how young children learn to read new words, we asked preschoolers (N = 115, mean age 4 years, 8 months) to learn and remember novel spellings that made sense based on letter names (e.g. TZ for "tease") and spellings that were visually distinctive but phonetically inappropriate. Children who were more knowledgeable about letter names…

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that…

Visual selective attention is the ability to attend to relevant visual information and ignore irrelevant stimuli. Little is known about its typical and atypical development in early childhood. Experiment 1 investigates typically developing toddlers' visual search for multiple targets on a touch-screen. Time to hit a target, distance between…

We have previously reported in this journal that spatial ability influences academic performance in engineering. We have also reported that spatial ability is trainable, and can be increased through instruction focused on using perception and mental imagery in three-dimensional representation. In this article, we present the results of a…

In this article, the authors investigate visual and tactile ASL-English interpreters' influences on interactive discourse through an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of videotaped, interpreted interactions. They examine the participation framework of each of the interactions to determine whether the interpreters' utterances influence the…

This paper discusses research findings regarding vocabulary instruction and reading comprehension and suggests methods to develop vocabulary using visual aids. As indicated by the research, vocabulary instruction is necessary and can lead to improved comprehension; there also appears to be a strong need to relate concrete visual experiences to…

This paper examines the mathematical conversations of middle school students as they use computer-mediated graphic representations to construct a shared understanding of the basic concepts of probability under two conditions. The first condition used graphical representations to depict important abstract relationships visually, and the second…

This study investigated associations between infants' prelinguistic communicative behaviors at 9 months and their communication and language performance at 12 and 18 months. The inclusion of both hearing (N=19) and deaf (N=16) infants in the study allowed identification of effects related to the receptive communication modality (vision versus…

Television has the ability to present information in two sensory channels simultaneously. Well-constructed dual-channel messages have great power to facilitate remembering and understanding, but poorly constructed ones have the power to confuse. Researchers' descriptions of audio/video combinations were compared with those of audience members and…

NCR (National Cash Register) Corporation is pursuing opportunities to make their point of sale (POS) terminals easy to use and easy to learn. To approach the goal of making the technology invisible to the user, NCR has developed an adaptive expert prototype system for a department store POS operation. The structure for the adaptive system, the…

A study examined what effect, if any, vision training exercises had on reading achievement. It was hypothesized that training students to control more accurately the speed and direction of their eye movements would improve their visual skills. However, it was also hypothesized that a more efficient visual system would have no effect on reading…

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…