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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Classroom Activities And Off - Task Behavior In Elementary School Children, Karrie Godwin, Ma. Almeda, Megan Petroccia, Ryan Baker, Anna Fisher
Classroom Activities And Off - Task Behavior In Elementary School Children, Karrie Godwin, Ma. Almeda, Megan Petroccia, Ryan Baker, Anna Fisher
Ryan S.J.d. Baker
Maintaining focused attention in the classroom is considered an important factor for successful learning. Loss of instructional time due to off-task behavior is recognized as a significant challenge by both researchers and practitioners. However, there has been little research into the factors contributing to off-task behavior. This paper reports results from the first large-scale study investigating how elementary school children allocate their attention in classroom environments and how patterns of attention allocation change as a function of gender, grade level, and instructional format. The findings indicate that instructional format is related to off-task behavior in elementary school students. These findings …
Endogenous Spatial Attention: Evidence For Intact Functioning In Adults With Autism, Michael Grubb, Marlene Behrmann, Ryan Egan, Nancy Minshew, Marisa Carrasco, David Heeger
Endogenous Spatial Attention: Evidence For Intact Functioning In Adults With Autism, Michael Grubb, Marlene Behrmann, Ryan Egan, Nancy Minshew, Marisa Carrasco, David Heeger
Marlene Behrmann
Rapid manipulation of the attention field (i.e. the location and spread of visual spatial attention) is a critical aspect of human cognition, and previous research on spatial attention in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has produced inconsistent results. In a series of three psychophysical experiments, we evaluated claims in the literature that individuals with ASD exhibit a deficit in voluntarily controlling the deployment and size of the spatial attention field. We measured the spatial distribution of performance accuracies and reaction times to quantify the sizes and locations of the attention field, with and without spatial uncertainty (i.e. the lack …
Visual Attention Deficits In Alzheimer’S Disease: Relationship To Hmpao Spect Cortical Hypoperfusion, Brandon Vasquez, Brian Buck, Sandra Black, Farrell Leibovitch, Nancy Lobaugh, Curtis Caldwell, Marlene Behrmann
Visual Attention Deficits In Alzheimer’S Disease: Relationship To Hmpao Spect Cortical Hypoperfusion, Brandon Vasquez, Brian Buck, Sandra Black, Farrell Leibovitch, Nancy Lobaugh, Curtis Caldwell, Marlene Behrmann
Marlene Behrmann
Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) display a multiplicity of cognitive deficits in domains such as memory, language, and attention, all of which can be clearly linked to the underlying neuropathological alterations. The typical degenerative changes occur early on in the disease in the temporal–parietal lobes, with other brain regions, such as the frontal cortex, becoming more affected as the disease progresses. In light of the importance of the parietal cortex in mediating visuospatial attentional processing, in the present study, we investigated a deficit in covert orienting of visual attention and its relationship to cortical hypoperfusion in AD. We characterized the …
Aging Of Attention: Does The Ability To Divide Decline?, T. Salthouse, N. Fristoe, Tara Lineweaver, V. Coon
Aging Of Attention: Does The Ability To Divide Decline?, T. Salthouse, N. Fristoe, Tara Lineweaver, V. Coon
Tara T. Lineweaver
Previous research has yielded conflicting results regarding the relationship between adult age and the ability to divide attention between two concurrent tasks. At least some of the inconsistency is probably attributable to methodological variations, such as the manner in which divided-attention ability has been assessed, how single-task performance has been considered, and the degree of control over relative emphasis placed on each task. Two experiments employing procedures sensitive to these concerns were conducted in which a speeded decision task was performed during the retention interval of a letter-memory task. The results of both experiments indicated that there were relatively few …
Bimanual Reaching Across The Hemispace: Which Hand Is Yoked To Which?, Gavin Buckingham, Gordon Binsted, David Carey
Bimanual Reaching Across The Hemispace: Which Hand Is Yoked To Which?, Gavin Buckingham, Gordon Binsted, David Carey
Gavin Buckingham
When both hands perform concurrent goal-directed reaches, they become yoked to one another. To investigate the direction of this coupling (i.e., which hand is yoked to which), the temporal dynamics of bimanual reaches were compared with equivalent-amplitude unimanual reaches. These reaches were to target pairs located on either the left or right sides of space; meaning that in the bimanual condition, one hand's contralateral (more difficult) reach accompanied by the other hand's ipsilateral (easier) reach. By comparing which hand's difficult reach was improved more by the presence of the other hand's easier ipsilateral reach, we were able to demonstrate asymmetries …
Rightward Biases During Bimanual Reaching, Gavin Buckingham, David Carey
Rightward Biases During Bimanual Reaching, Gavin Buckingham, David Carey
Gavin Buckingham
Two experiments were carried out to investigate whether attention is biased toward the right hand of right handers during bimanual coordination (Peters 1981). A novel discontinuous double-step reaching task was developed, where right-handed participants executed a bimanual reach followed by a left or right hand unimanual reach. Asymmetries in the downtime between the bimanual and unimanual reach portions (the refractory period) were used to infer the direction of attention. A shorter right hand refractory period was found in the first experiment, indicating a rightward bias in attention. In a second experiment, shifting the focus of attention during the bimanual portion …