This study aimed to compare cognitive and memory abilities between older adults with and without autism over the age of 50. Twenty-eight individuals with autism and 29 typically developing (TD) older adults took part in the current study. Participants' cognitive and memory abilities were assessed by WAIS-IV and WMS-IV. Older autistic adults were…

Research suggests that spatial ability may predict success in complex disciplines including anatomy, where mastery requires a firm understanding of the intricate relationships occurring along the course of veins, arteries, and nerves, as they traverse through and around bones, muscles, and organs. Debate exists on the malleability of spatial…

Purpose: Previous work has found that both young and older adults exhibit a lexical bias in categorizing speech stimuli. In young adults, this has been argued to be an automatic influence of the lexicon on perceptual category boundaries. Older adults exhibit more top-down biases than younger adults, including an increased lexical bias. We…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to investigate vowel detection and identification in noise and provide baseline data regarding how vowel perception changed with signal-to-noise ratios. Psychometric functions of vowel detection and identification for 12 American English isolated vowels in long-term speech-shaped noise were examined for young…

Over 15,000 master's and doctoral degree students in the United States were denied admission to nursing schools in 2014 because of insufficient nursing faculty. In 2016, over 64,000 undergraduate and graduate students were unable to gain admission to nursing school due to the effects of faculty shortages. This project explored the role of the…

The aim of this dissertation is to bring to light factors that affect how people who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) access, consume, design and produce with different types of tactile media for themselves or for others who are also BVI. Toward the goal of creating equity within the media and information landscape and beyond, this…

Adults use vision to perceive low-fidelity speech; yet how children acquire this ability is not well understood. The literature indicates that children show reduced sensitivity to visual speech from kindergarten to adolescence. We hypothesized that this pattern reflects the effects of complex tasks and a growth period with harder-to-utilize…

This study used an ethological approach to explore the behavioural adaptation of nineteen infants during their first six weeks in Residential Care (RC), or a Foster Family (FF) or an Infant-Mother Centre (IMC). Direct observations were conducted once a week at bath time. Observed behaviours were: sleep-wake states, visual exploration, motor…

The present study investigated the effect of emotional valence on auditory word recognition memory in English as a foreign language. Participants included 48 native Spanish speakers whose foreign language was English. They viewed four emotionally negative, four positive, and four neutral videos that, in total, contained 48 emotionally valenced…

In this study, we propose a hypothesis that domain-general auditory processing, a perceptual anchor of L1 acquisition, can serve as the foundation of successful post-pubertal L2 learning. This hypothesis was tested with 139 post-pubertal L2 immersion learners by linking individual differences in auditory discrimination across multiple acoustic…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of wearing earplugs on classical musicians' pitch perception across three experimental conditions: no earplugs, foam earplugs, and Etymotic earplugs. Participants were graduate and undergraduate music majors attending a large school of music in the southeastern United States (N = 72).…

The purpose of this study was to analyze visual attention during students' learning of Toulmin's argument pattern (TAP) and the effects of epistemic beliefs in science on the understanding of argument components. A total of 43 undergraduates were recruited through the Internet. Online questionnaires targeting beliefs about knowledge in science…

Tactile, motor and cognitive capacities decline with age, but little is known about how this relates to braille reading outcomes. This study investigated correlates of braille reading speed among working-age and older adults. Texts were read in two modes (oral/silent) and two media (paper/electronic braille display) by 46 blind adults (age range…

Purpose: The clinical diagnosis of motor speech disorders (MSDs) is mainly based on perceptual approaches. However, studies on perceptual classification of MSDs often indicate low classification accuracy. The aim of this study was to determine in a forced-choice dichotomous decision-making task (a) how accuracy of speech-language pathologists…

Many studies have been conducted on the development of young children; however, not many have explored the cognitive processes of prereaders. The eye-tracker has been used with success to investigate the cognitive processes of young children abroad, but such studies are lacking in Malaysia. This study used an experimental procedure created with…