Taking a perception-action perspective, we investigated how the presence of different real objects in children's immediate situation affected their creativity and whether this effect was moderated by their selective attention. Seventy children between ages 9 and 12 years old participated. Verbal responses on a visual Alternative Uses Task with a…

Theoretical perspectives of cognitive development have maintained that functional integration of the prefrontal cortex across infancy underlies the emergence of attentional control and higher cognitive abilities in early childhood. To investigate these proposed relations, we tested whether functional integration of prefrontal regions across the…

The "familiarity effect" (Shen and Reingold, "Perception & Psychophysics" 63(3):464-475, 2001) is a phenomenon in which unfamiliar symbols perceptually "pop-out" when placed among familiar symbols (e.g., letters). In contrast, searching for familiar symbols among unfamiliar symbols is more challenging. Failure to…

Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to carry out intended actions in the future (e.g., posting a letter on the way to school or passing on a message) and is important for children's independent functioning in daily life. This study examined, for the first time, the effects of incidental reminder cues on children's PM. Five- and 7-year-old…

Background: The most challenging task in eye-tracking-based multimedia research is to establish a relationship between eye-tracking metrics (or cognitive processes) and learners' performance scores. Additionally, there are current debates about the effectiveness of animations (or simulations) in promoting learning in multimedia settings.…

Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs have many benefits but also carry risks, such as adverse drug reactions, which are more prevalent in older adults. Because these products do not require the oversight of a physician or pharmacist, labeling plays a key role in communicating information required for their safe and effective use. Research suggests that…

This study assessed visual search abilities, tested through the flicker task, in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Twenty-two children diagnosed with ASD and 22 matched typically developing (TD) children were told to detect changes in objects of central interest or objects of marginal interest (MI) embedded in either…

A high Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) score (Baron-Cohen et al. in "J Autism Dev Disord" 31(1):5-17, 2001) is increasingly used as a proxy in empirical studies of perceptual mechanisms in autism. Several investigations have assessed perception in non-autistic people measured for AQ, claiming the same relationship exists between…

Recent empirical and theoretical work has depicted a close relationship between visual attention and visual working memory. For example, rehearsal in spatial working memory depends on spatial attention, whereas adding a secondary spatial working memory task impairs attentional deployment in visual search. These findings have led to the proposal…

The use of computer-based tests (CBTs), for both formative and summative purposes, has greatly increased over the past years. One major advantage of CBTs is the easy integration of multimedia. It is unclear, though, how to design such CBT environments with multimedia. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether guidelines for designing…

Four experiments examined how faces compete with physically salient stimuli for the control of attention in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants (N = 117 total). Three computational models were used to quantify physical salience. We presented infants with visual search arrays containing a face and familiar object(s), such as shoes and flowers. Six- and…

Locating a target in a visual search task is facilitated when the target location is repeated on successive trials. Global statistical properties also influence visual search, but have often been confounded with local regularities (i.e., target location repetition). In two experiments, target locations were not repeated for four successive trials,…

Purpose: This study investigated the roles of cross-language transfer of first language (L1) and attentional control in second-language (L2) speech perception and production of sequential bilinguals, taking phonological overlap into account. Method: Twenty-five monolingual Dutch-speaking and 25 sequential bilingual Turkish-Dutch-speaking 3- and…

Given the centrality of data visualizations in communicating scientific information, increased emphasis has been placed on the development of students' graph literacy--the ability to generate and interpret data representations--to foster understanding of domain-specific knowledge and the successful navigation of everyday life. Despite prior…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…