Interest in students who exhibit characteristics with difficulties in learning can be traced as far back as 1800. In order to better understand the complexities and causes of learning disabilities, many researchers (Bannatyne, 1968, 1974; Rugal, 1974) have investigated ways to better identify learners who struggle with academics. A strong argument…

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to…

Among the large variety of attentional tasks that have been used to study sustained attention, the Continuous Performance Task (CPT) is perhaps the most widely used. Despite substantial differences in task characteristics and demands, all CPT paradigms have been referred to as measures of sustained attention. In the present study we introduce a…

Negative priming (NP) refers to the finding that people's responses to probe targets previously presented as prime distractors are usually slower than to unrepeated stimuli. Intriguingly, the effect sizes of tactile NP were much larger than the effect sizes for visual NP. We analyzed whether the large tactile NP effect is just a side effect of the…

We report a study of the depiction of partial occlusion and its relationship with field independence (FI) in children with ASD. Nineteen ASD children and 29 TD children (5;6-10;0) attempted to copy two 3D occluded scenes, and also selected the "best" depiction of these scenes in drawings by others. ASD children were not significantly…

This study examined adults' evaluations of likeability and attractiveness of children's faces from infancy to early childhood. We tested whether Lorenz's baby schema hypothesis ("Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie" (1943), Vol. 5, pp. 235-409) is applicable not only to infant faces but also to faces of children at older ages. Adult participants were…

Background: The ComFor study has indicated that individuals with intellectual disability (ID) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced visual local processing compared with individuals with ID only. Items of the ComFor with meaningless materials provided the best discrimination between the two samples. These results can be explained by the…

Right-handed participants respond more quickly and more accurately to written words presented in the right visual field (RVF) than in the left visual field (LVF). Previous attempts to identify the neural basis of the RVF advantage have had limited success. Experiment 1 was a behavioral study of lateralized word naming which established that the…

Objective: To examine whether participants with ADHD showed a deficit in Stroop/reverse-Stroop interference by comparing them to non-ADHD participants. Method: A group with ADHD, primarily inattentive type (n = 15), and a paired non-ADHD group (n = 15) completed the group version of the Stroop/reverse-Stroop test. Results: Asymmetric interference…

Young adult literature (YAL) is one of the most engaging and effective tools to promote the goal of lifelong literacy for middle and high school students. This article addresses the stakes of exploring--or failing to explore--common perceptions and misperceptions of YAL. Readers' lives as family members, consumers, and students play roles in their…

American listeners' perception of Japanese contrasts of vowel length (e.g., kiro vs. kiiro), consonant length (e.g., kite vs. kitte) and syllable number/length (e.g., kjoo vs. kijoo) was examined. Stimuli consisted of sentence-length utterances produced by a native Japanese talker; five minimal pairs of each contrast type were included. Questions…

The adult learner is typically a motivated student who comes to class prepared to pay attention. They also come with cognitive and emotional stimuli not related to the course's content, which can be distracting especially at the start of a class or following a break. Ways of dealing with the problem of start-of-class attention, and for that…

Word production difficulties are well documented in dyslexia, whereas the results are mixed for receptive phonological processing. This asymmetry raises the possibility that the core phonological deficit of dyslexia is restricted to output processing stages. The present study investigated whether a group of dyslexics had word level receptive…

In a recent paper, Chiarello, Welcome, Halderman, and Leonard (2009) reported positive correlations between word-related visual field asymmetries and reading performance. They argued that strong word processing lateralization represents a more optimal brain organization for reading acquisition. Their empirical results contrasted sharply with those…

Background: Williams syndrome (WMS) is a rare genetic disorder with an estimated prevalence of 1 in 20,000 live births. Among other characteristics, WMS has a distinctive cognitive profile with spared face processing and language skills that contrasts with impairment in the cognitive domains of spatial cognition, problem solving and planning. It…