Post-error slowing: Large scale study in an online learning environment for practising mathematics and language.

The ability to monitor and adjust our performance is crucial for adaptive behaviour, a key component of human cognitive control. One widely studied metric of this behaviour is post-error slowing (PES), the finding that humans tend to slow down their performance after making an error. This study is a first attempt at generalizing the effect of PES to an online adaptive learning environment where children practise mathematics and language skills.

Reading ability in children relates to rhythm perception across modalities.

The onset of reading ability is rife with individual differences, with some children termed "early readers" and some falling behind from the very beginning. Reading skill in children has been linked to an ability to remember nonverbal rhythms, specifically in the auditory modality. It has been hypothesized that the link between rhythm skills and reading reflects a shared reliance on the ability to extract temporal structure from sound.

The emergence of object-based visual attention in infancy: A role for family socioeconomic status and competing visual features.

The development of spatial visual attention has been extensively studied in infants, but far less is known about the emergence of object-based visual attention. We tested 3-5- and 9-12-month-old infants on a task that allowed us to measure infants' attention orienting bias toward whole objects when they competed with color, motion, and orientation feature information. Infants' attention orienting to whole objects was affected by the dimension of the competing visual feature.

Should online math learning environments be tailored to individuals' cognitive profiles?

Online learning environments are well-suited for tailoring the learning experience of children individually and on a large scale. An environment such as Math Garden allows children to practice exercises adapted to their specific mathematical ability; this is thought to maximize their mathematical skills. In the current experiment, we investigated whether learning environments should also consider the differential impact of cognitive load on children's math performance depending on their individual verbal working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC) capacity.

Do cues from multiple modalities support quicker learning in primary schoolchildren?

The current study investigates whether informative, mutually redundant audiovisual cues support better performance in a category learning paradigm. Research suggests that, under some conditions, redundant multisensory cues supports better learning, when compared with unisensory cues. This was examined systematically across two experiments.

Is Classroom Noise Always Bad for Children? The Contribution of Age and Selective Attention to Creative Performance in Noise.

Creativity is considered an important skill in learning but little is known about the environmental factors affecting it in classroom settings. Extending adult findings, this study assessed whether moderate multi-talker noise promotes children's creativity, and whether this is modulated by children's age, working memory, and selective attention. Forty-four elementary school children between 5 and 11 years of age, divided into younger and older age groups, participated in this within-subjects' study.

Withstanding the test of time: Multisensory cues improve the delayed retention of incidental learning.

Multisensory tools are commonly employed within educational settings (e.g. Carter & Stephenson, ), and there is a growing body of literature advocating the benefits of presenting children with multisensory information over unisensory cues for learning (Baker & Jordan, ; Jordan & Baker, ).

Information processes of task-switching and modality-shifting across development.

Developmental research on flexible attentional control in young children has often focused on the role of attention in task-switching in a unimodal context. In real life, children must master the art of switching attention not only between task demands, but also between sensory modalities. Previous study has shown that young children can be efficient at switching between unimodal tasks when the situation allows, incurring no greater task-switching costs than adults.

Task switching costs in preschool children and adults.

Past research investigating cognitive flexibility has shown that preschool children make many perseverative errors in tasks that require switching between different sets of rules. However, this inflexibility might not necessarily hold with easier tasks. The current study investigated the developmental differences in cognitive flexibility using a task-switching procedure that compared reaction times and accuracy in 4- and 6-year-olds with those in adults.

Infant Statistical Learning.

Perception involves making sense of a dynamic, multimodal environment. In the absence of mechanisms capable of exploiting the statistical patterns in the natural world, infants would face an insurmountable computational problem. Infant statistical learning mechanisms facilitate the detection of structure.

Incidental learning in a multisensory environment across childhood.

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty-one children aged between 6 and 10 years participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT).

Infants Rely More on Gaze Cues From Own-Race Than Other-Race Adults for Learning Under Uncertainty.

Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own- over other-race faces, but whether this experience has downstream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7-month-olds (range = 5.9-8.

Across space and time: infants learn from backward and forward visual statistics.

This study investigates whether infants are sensitive to backward and forward transitional probabilities within temporal and spatial visual streams. Two groups of 8-month-old infants were familiarized with an artificial grammar of shapes, comprising backward and forward base pairs (i.e.

Infants track the reliability of potential informants.

Across two eye-tracking experiments, we showed that infants are sensitive to the statistical reliability of informative cues and selective in their use of information generated by such cues. We familiarized 8-month-olds with faces (Experiment 1) or arrows (Experiment 2) that cued the locations of animated animals with different degrees of reliability. The reliable cue always cued a box containing an animation, whereas the unreliable cue cued a box that contained an animation only 25% of the time.

Individual differences in infant fixation duration relate to attention and behavioral control in childhood.

Individual differences in fixation duration are considered a reliable measure of attentional control in adults. However, the degree to which individual differences in fixation duration in infancy (0-12 months) relate to temperament and behavior in childhood is largely unknown. In the present study, data were examined from 120 infants (mean age = 7.

Ostensive signals support learning from novel attention cues during infancy.

Social attention cues (e.g., head turning, gaze direction) highlight which events young infants should attend to in a busy environment and, recently, have been shown to shape infants' likelihood of learning about objects and events.

Infants' selective attention to reliable visual cues in the presence of salient distractors.

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6- and 8-month-olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue-reward relation. While 8-month-olds showed evidence of increasingly selective attention toward the predictive cues, even when the distractors were highly salient, 6-month-olds shifted attention toward the predictive cues only when the distractors were equally (not more) engaging.

Learning to look: probabilistic variation and noise guide infants' eye movements.

Young infants have demonstrated a remarkable sensitivity to probabilistic relations among visual features (Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Kirkham et al., 2002). Previous research has raised important questions regarding the usefulness of statistical learning in an environment filled with variability and noise, such as an infant's natural world.

The influence of social information on children's statistical and causal inferences.

Constructivist accounts of learning posit that causal inference is a child-driven process. Recent interpretations of such accounts also suggest that the process children use for causal learning is rational: Children interpret and learn from new evidence in light of their existing beliefs. We argue that such mechanisms are also driven by informative social cues and suggest ways in which such information influences both preschoolers' and infants' inferences.

The importance of "what": infants use featural information to index events.

Dynamic spatial indexing is the ability to encode, remember, and track the location of complex events. For example, in a previous study, 6-month-old infants were familiarized to a toy making a particular sound in a particular location, and later they fixated that empty location when they heard the sound presented alone (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2004, Vol. 133, pp.

Joint perception: gaze and social context.

We found that the way people looked at images was influenced by their belief that others were looking too. If participants believed that an unseen other person was also looking at what they could see, it shifted the balance of their gaze between negative and positive images. The direction of this shift depended upon whether participants thought that later they would be compared against the other person or would be collaborating with them.

The dynamics of reference and shared visual attention.

In the tangram task, two participants are presented with the same set of abstract shapes portrayed in different orders. One participant must instruct the other to arrange their shapes so that the orders match. To do this, they must find a way to refer to the abstract shapes.

Sound support: intermodal information facilitates infants' perception of an occluded trajectory.

In a visual occlusion task, 4-month-olds were given a dynamic sound cue (following the trajectory of an object), or a static cue (sound remained stationary). Infants' oculomotor anticipations were greater in the Dynamic condition, suggesting that representations of visual occlusion were supported by auditory information.

Infants learn about objects from statistics and people.

In laboratory experiments, infants are sensitive to patterns of visual features that co-occur (e.g., Fiser & Aslin, 2002).

No two cues are alike: Depth of learning during infancy is dependent on what orients attention.

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants' attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment 1 used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds' attention to two audiovisual events (i.