The current study investigated how individual differences among children affect the added value of social robots for teaching second language (L2) vocabulary to young children. Specifically, we moderating role three child characteristics deemed relevant learning: first (L1) knowledge, phonological memory, and selective attention. We expected low in these abilities particularly benefit from bein...

A general-purpose object indexing technique is described that combines the virtues of principal component analysis with the favorable matching properties of high-dimensional spaces to achieve high precision recognition. An object is represented by a set of high-dimensional iconic feature vectors comprised of the responses of derivative of Gaussian filters at a range of orientations and scales. ...

Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy, collegeaged participants encoded either a series ...

In three experiments, subjects attempted to detect the change of a single item in a visually presented array of items. Subjects' ability to detect a change was greatly reduced if a blank interstimulus interval (ISI) was inserted between the original array and an array in which one item had changed ('change blindness'). However, change detection improved when the location of the change was cued ...

Thirty hospitalized, acute, male, psychiatric patients (15 schizophrenics and 15 nonschizophrenics) were administered a full-report span of apprehension task. Contrary to previous studies which had employed a partial-report task, no differences were found between these two groups. From the two sets of findings, an explanation of schizophrenic deficit in terms of iconic (unprocessed) memory deca...

This paper studies how visual perception of a scene is affected by cognitive processes beyond the scene's bottom-up saliency. The game of SET is taken as an example where contrast-based salient parts of a scene are ignored in favor of a larger group of similar elements. Using results from a laboratory experiment and a model simulation we explain how three cognitive mechanisms, differential acui...