Studies have shown that American Sign Language (ASL) fluency has a positive impact on deaf individuals' English reading, but the cognitive and cross-linguistic mechanisms permitting the mapping of a visual-manual language onto a sound-based language have yet to be elucidated. Fingerspelling, which represents English orthography with 26 distinct hand configurations, is an integral part of ASL an...

PURPOSE Most school vision screenings test only visual acuity. There is a need for a valid, easily administered test that screens for a wider variety of learning-related vision problems. Visual Efficiency RAting (VERA) is a software program designed for schools to detect both routine vision problems and visual skill problems. The purpose of this study was to compare the VERA visual skills scree...

One of the earliest behaviors driven by intrinsic motivation is visual exploration. In this chapter, I highlight how the development of this capacity is influenced not only by changes in the brain that take place after birth but also by the acquisition of oculomotor skill. To provide a context for interpreting these developmental changes, I then survey three theoretical perspectives that are av...

Visual cortex plasticity is enhanced by sleep. It is hypothesized that a reactivation of glutamatergic synapses is essential for this form of plasticity to occur after learning. To test this hypothesis, human subjects practiced a visual texture discrimination skill known to require post-training sleep for improvements to occur. During sleep, glutamatergic transmission was inhibited by administr...

In 2013, Canadian scholars delivered a 1-week workshop to 30 junior public health professionals in Rwanda. The goal was to improve the Rwandans' skills and confidence with respect to writing scientific papers for submission to international peer-reviewed global health journals. As a result of the workshop, there was a statistically significant improvement in participants' reported confidence in...

There are differences in the way infants learn, perceive, and understand the environment as compared to adults (Bornstein, 1989; Nelson, 2000; Craik and Bialystok, 2006). While an adult has an established, clear perception of his environment, infants are still forming perceptions of the world (Hall et al., 1989; Holt, 1991; Zitelli and Davis, 2007). The mechanisms underlying these differences a...

Novel experience and learning new skills are known as modulators of brain function. Advances in non-invasive brain imaging have provided new insight into structural and functional reorganization associated with skill learning and expertise. Especially, significant imaging evidences come from the domains of sports and music. Data from in vivo imaging studies in sports and music have provided vit...

We introduce a novel paradigm for robot programming with which we aim to make robot programming more accessible for unexperienced users. In order to do so we incorporate two major components in one single framework: autonomous skill acquisition by robotic playing and visual programming. Simple robot program skeletons solving a task for one specific situation, so-called basic behaviours, are pro...