This study examined the effectiveness of two approaches used in elementary schools to improve children's handwriting. Participants were 72 New York City public school students from the first and second grades. A nonequivalent pretest-posttest group design was used in which students engaged in handwriting activities using two approaches: intensive handwriting practice and visual-perceptual-motor...

Previous research has shown that typical adults demonstrate a heightened visual sensitivity to potentially threatening biological motion (Chouchourelou, Matsuka, Harber, & Shiffrar, 2006). Namely, typical adults are more sensitive to the presence of an angry point-light walker as compared to the presence of happy, fearful, sad, or neutral walkers. This is known as the anger-superiority effect. ...

CONTEXT Current methods of assessing candidates for medical specialties that involve laparoscopic skills suffer from a lack of instruments to assess the ability to work in a minimally invasive surgery environment. OBJECTIVES A meta-analysis was conducted to investigate whether aptitude assessment can be used to predict variability in the acquisition and performance of laparoscopic skills. M...

BACKGROUND Clinical observation is fundamental in practicing medicine, but these skills are rarely taught. Currently no evidence-based exercises/courses exist for medical student training in observation skills. AIM The goal was to develop and teach a visual arts-based exercise for medical students, and to evaluate its usefulness in enhancing observation skills in clinical diagnosis. METHODS...

Children acquire attention skills rapidly during early childhood as their brains undergo vast neural development. Attention is well studied in the adult brain, yet due to the challenges associated with scanning young children, investigations in early childhood are sparse. Here, we examined the relationship between age, attention and functional connectivity (FC) during passive viewing in multipl...

Forty children were studied as they began to learn to read at 5 years old and as they developed their skill up to 7 years old. At each year they were tested for ability on 44 variables which measured ability in reading, spelling, vocabulary, short-term memory, visual perception and discrimination, auditory-visual integration, language knowledge, phonological awareness, grammatical knowledge, ro...

Lecturers see students struggle learning software design. In order to create educational interventions it is needed to know which (abstract) reasoning skills are related to students’ software design performance. We introduce an online software design skills test for measuring students’ software design skills. Two student groups of two different European universities participated in an experimen...

There is much anecdotal suggestion of improved visual skills in congenitally deaf individuals. However, this claim has only been met by mixed results from careful investigations of visual skills in deaf individuals. Psychophysical assessments of visual functions have failed, for the most part, to validate the view of enhanced visual skills after deafness. Only a few studies have shown an advant...