Eight experiments investigated the effects of visual, spatial, auditory, and executive interference on the symbolic comparison of animal size and ferocity, semantic goodness of words, and numbers. Dynamic visual noise (DVN) and the reading of visually presented stimulus items were shown to selectively interfere with response times on the animal…

This article introduces an approach to planning sequences of communication tasks that require learners to become personally involved in their learning. By drawing on their own ideas and experiences, as a product of earlier tasks in a given sequence, learners generate the content and resource material on which subsequent tasks operate. The article…

Classical fear conditioning requires the recognition of conditioned stimuli (CS) and the association of the CS with an aversive stimulus. We used Affymetrix oligonucleotide microarrays to characterize changes in gene expression compared to naive mice in both the amygdala and the hippocampus 30 min after classical fear conditioning and 30 min after…

Information storage in the brain is a temporally graded process involving different memory phases as well as different structures in the mammalian brain. Cortical plasticity seems to be essential to store stable long-term memories, although little information is available at the moment regarding molecular and cellular events supporting memory…

We examine the visual processing of high-functioning adults with developmental dyslexia (mean Performance IQ=126.5) and current phonological problems. In comparison to an age- and IQ-matched control group, the group with dyslexia showed deficits in two tasks associated with magnocellular/dorsal pathway function. For the "frequency doubling"…

One hypothesis holds that bilingual children's cross-linguistic transfer occurs in spontaneous production when there is structural overlap between the two languages and ambiguity in at least one language (Dopke, 1998; Hulk and Muller, 2000). This study tested whether overlap/ambiguity of adjective-noun strings in English and French predicted…

Cross-language (L1-to-L2) syntactic priming is the repetition of utterance structure from one language to another independently of meaning and has motivated models of language-shared representations of L1-L2 equivalent structures (Salamoura and Williams, submitted; Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker and Pickering, submitted). These models assume that the…

We investigated the role of executive and spatial representational processes in impaired performance of block construction tasks by children with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic defect that results in severely impaired spatial cognition. In Experiment 1, we examined performance in two kinds of block construction tasks, Simple Puzzles, in…

In this article, we explore how students' agency relates to both highly structured and open-ended learning environments. This is done by analysing how students' understanding of tasks evolves through their activities in relation to the representations inscribed in two technology-rich learning environments. Based on the sociocultural approach to…

Tasks with adult learners have been discussed extensively in the language learning literature whilst studies about children using tasks are less widespread. Children's ability to interact on tasks with each other grows steadily with age. This paper reports on the differences observed in the interactions of 10-year-old children and adult learners.…

Two experiments explore children's spontaneous labeling of novel objects as a method to study early lexical access. The experiments also provide new evidence on children's attention to object shape when labeling objects. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous productions of 21 23- to 28-month-olds (mean 26;28) shown a set of novel, unnamed objects were…

Objective: To investigate the effect of a nutrition education intervention and four hours of related teaching on the nutrition concepts of a sample of 9 year-old children. Design: Prepost test design. Children's food classification concepts were assessed before and after the intervention and nutrition teaching. Setting: Year 4 class of a suburban…

We assessed 19-month-olds' appreciation of the conventional nature of object labels versus desires. Infants played a finding game with an experimenter who stated her intention to find the referent of a novel word (word group), to find an object she wanted (desire group), or simply to look in a box (control group). A 2nd experimenter then…

Objective: The authors investigated line bisection performance in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) subtypes. Previous research with neurotypical children found a rightward bias with right-hand use and a leftward bias with left-hand use; however, research with AD/HD participants has failed to similarly measure the…

Contrary to empirical reports of inhibitory dysfunction in ADHD, parental reports suggest that when playing computer games, the inhibitory abilities of children with ADHD are unimpaired. This small-scale preliminary investigation into this phenomenon looks at inhibition of an ongoing response and activity exhibited by children with ADHD between 6…