Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
By Peter Jurich, Waisman Science Writer With every challenge comes new opportunities. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, much of the country went on lock-down with only essential services and operations remaining. The Waisman Center was no exception. Essential operations continued in the building and hundreds of employees transitioned to working …
Eye-gaze methods offer numerous advantages for studying cognitive processes in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but data loss may threaten the validity and generalizability of results. Some eye-gaze systems may be more vulnerable to data loss than others, but to our knowledge, this issue has not been empirically investigated. In the current study, we asked whether automatic eye-tracking and manual gaze coding produce different rates of data loss or different results in a group of 51 toddlers with ASD.
In an upcoming study in Current Biology, published online Aug. 16, researchers at the Arizona State University Department of Psychology and the Waisman Center report a factor that is important for language learning in children: the predictability of the learning environment.
Children use the presence of familiar objects with known names to identify the correct referents of novel words. In natural environments, objects vary widely in salience. The presence of familiar objects may sometimes hinder rather than help word learning.
Say you are shown an apple, a banana and a fruit you have never seen before. Then you are asked to pick the “pifo.” Which fruit would you choose? Chances are you would select the novel fruit.
Language is used to identify objects in many different ways. For example, an apple can be identified using its name, color, and other attributes. Skilled language comprehension requires listeners to flexibly shift between different dimensions.
The environments children are in, including how much and what kinds of stimulation they are exposed to, influence what and how they learn. One important task for children is zeroing in on the information that’s relevant to what they’re learning and ignoring what isn’t. A new study has found that the presence of background noise …
Legend: Results of a study in which toddlers learned new words in environments with different levels of background noise. The solid vertical line marks the onset of the target word. The dashed vertical line marks the beginning of the test window (300 ms after the onset of the spoken word). Chance performance is .5. Toddlers …
Jenny Saffran, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of psychology and an expert on how infants learn, is among leaders in academia, business, public affairs and the arts elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Imagine that you’ve been dropped into an unfamiliar country. People are speaking all around you. But you don’t recognize the sounds or objects surrounding you. You don’t even hear words; all the sounds are mushed together. It is very confusing.
