The present study investigated how spatial working memory recruits early visual cortex. Participants were required to maintain a location in working memory while changes in blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signals were measured during the retention interval in which no visual stimulation was present. We show working memory effects during the…

Recent research has suggested that reading involves the mental simulation of events and actions described in a text. It is possible however that previous findings did not tap into processes engaged during natural reading but rather those triggered by task demands. The present study examined whether readers spontaneously mentally simulate the…

This study examined the development of the episodic and semantic memory systems, with an emphasis on the emergence of the two aspects of the former: episodic memory (the ability to re-experience a past event) and episodic future thinking (the ability to pre-experience a future event). Three-, 4-, and 5-year olds were randomly assigned to one of…

Aging impacts memory formation and the engagement of frontal and medial temporal regions. However, much of the research to date has focused on the encoding of neutral verbal and visual information. The present fMRI study investigated age differences in a social encoding task while participants made judgments about the self or another person.…

This research project studied the effect that a technology-based training program, WheelchairNet, could contribute to the education of children with physical disabilities by providing a chance to practice driving virtual motorized wheelchairs safely within a computer-generated world. Programmers created three virtual worlds for training. Scenarios…

Learners are multi-faceted, unique people. Discovering the whole individual is incumbent upon realizing the teaching/learning environments, common social and societal realities, and belief and value systems respective of academic and socio-societal factors that establish who one is as a learner and teacher. In "Learning and Teaching," the authors…

The current study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of keyword-based instruction in enhancing English vocabulary achievement and retention of intermediate stage pupils with different working memory capacities. The study adopted a quasi experimental design employing two groups (experimental and control). The design included an independent…

In the year 2009, 667 individuals lost their lives in a highway construction or maintenance work zone (National Work Zone Safety Information Clearinghouse, 2010). Since the year 2003, 6,438 individuals have been killed in a highway construction or maintenance work zone, which is approximately 805 deaths per calendar year (National Work Zone Safety…

Current theories of category learning posit separate verbal and nonverbal learning systems. Past research suggests that the verbal system relies on verbal working memory and executive functioning and learns rule-defined categories; the nonverbal system does not rely on verbal working memory and learns non-rule-defined categories (E. M. Waldron…

Inattentional blindness refers to the finding that people do not always see what appears in their gaze. Though inattentional blindness affects large percentages of people, it is unclear if there are individual differences in susceptibility. The present study addressed whether individual differences in attentional control, as reflected by…

The ability to mentally simulate possible futures ("episodic future thinking") is of fundamental importance for various aspects of human cognition and behavior, but precisely how humans construct mental representations of future events is still essentially unknown. We suggest that episodic future thoughts consist of transitory patterns…

Research on shallow processing suggests that readers sometimes encode only a superficial representation of a text and fail to make use of all available information. Greene, McKoon, and Ratcliff (1992) extended this work to pronouns, finding evidence that readers sometimes fail to automatically identify referents even when these are unambiguous. In…

The expression of expert motor skills typically involves learning to perform a precisely timed sequence of movements. Research examining incidental sequence learning has relied on a perceptually cued task that gives participants exposure to repeating motor sequences but does not require timing of responses for accuracy. In the 1st experiment, a…

The present research tested the hypothesis that the age at which one's first language (L1) words are learned influences language processing in bilinguals. Prior research on bilingual language processing by Kroll and colleagues has suggested that memory links between L1 words and conceptual representations are stronger than memory links between…

One of the most common and serious co-morbidities in patients with epilepsy is cognitive impairment. While early-life seizures are considered a major cause for cognitive impairment, it is not known whether it is the seizures, the underlying neurological substrate or a combination that has the largest impact on eventual learning and memory. Teasing…