Presents an illusional arena by offering experience in optical illusions in which students must apply critical analysis to their innate information gathering systems. Introduces different types of depth illusions for students to experience. (ASK)

Extended findings of a study that found that increasing the salience of perceptually important regions of nonsense word and sentence materials aids speech perception in noise by investigating the robustness of these enhancement techniques in improving consonant intelligibility for a range of different speakers and for groups of listeners with…

Describes heuristic-systematic information-processing model and risk perception--the two major conceptual areas of the analysis. Discusses the proposed model, describing the context of the data collections (public health communication involving cancer epidemiology) and providing the results of a set of three replications using the proposed model.…

In this study, the looking behavior of 16 autistic and 14 non-autistic children toward cartoon-like scenes that included a human figure was measured quantitatively using an infrared eye-tracking device. Fixation behavior of autistic children was similar to that of their age-and IQ-matched normal peers. Results do not support the idea that autistic…

Examines whether women who pursue scientific training are viewed negatively by college students. Investigates n=114 (56 women, 58 men) participants judgments about a woman describing her major; speaker's traits, social behaviors, and her future potential. Indicates that both major and commitment level influenced perceptions of the speaker.…

Describes a teacher who explores her passion for critical literacy by challenging students of privilege to name their identities and disrupt the familiar. Creates a classroom founded on the philosophy that every student needs and deserves to be exposed to critical literacy--reading literature and their own lives with an awareness of systems of…

A person-process-context ecological systems model provides an organizing framework for examining student and parental perceptions of school safety. Overall, adolescent age, SES, and neighborhood predicted school characteristics. School characteristics predicted parental involvement in schools, peers' educational expectations, exposure to…

Describes the Verbal Transformation Effect (VTE): When listeners hear the same word repeated very many times at a rapid rate, the word tends to be perceived as other words. Reports lexical effects in the VTE and examines their cause. (Author/VWL)

Four experiments utilizing the familiarization-novelty preference procedure examined whether 3- and 4-month-olds could form categorical representations for cats versus dogs from the perceptual information available in silhouettes. Findings indicated that general shape or external contour information centered about the head was sufficient for…

Explores potential for developing education for sustainability (EfS) through biodiversity planning in the UK based on a survey conducted in April 1999. Concludes that biodiversity practitioners have the tools to deliver EfS through implementation of local biodiversity action plans (LBAPs), the concept allowing close links to Local Agenda 21,…

This study examined event-related potentials (ERPs) to synthetic consonant-vowel syllables from 26 newborns with familial risk for dyslexia and 23 control infants participating in a longitudinal study of dyslexia. Results indicated that the cortical electric activation evoked by speech elements differed between children with and without risk for…

Humans are fast and accurate at performing an animal categorization task with natural photographs briefly flashed centrally. Here, this central categorization task is compared to a three position task in which photographs could appear randomly either centrally, or at 3.6 [degrees] eccentricity (right or left) of the fixation point. A mild…

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (Peretz &…

Most, if not all, of the studies of subtypes of children with language impairments have been conducted with English-speaking children. The possibility and validity of identified subtypes for non-English clinical populations are, as yet, unknown. This study was designed to provide cross-linguistic evidence of language subtypes. A broad battery of…

Three experiments examined 3- to 5-year-olds' use of eye gaze cues to infer truth in a deceptive situation. Children watched a video of an actor who hid a toy in 1 of 3 cups. In Experiments 1 and 2, the actor claimed ignorance about the toy's location but looked toward 1 of the cups, without (Experiment 1) and with (Experiment 2) head movement. In…