Little is known about the acoustic cues infants might use to selectively attend to one talker in the presence of background noise. This study examined the role of talker familiarity as a possible cue. Infants either heard their own mothers (maternal-voice condition) or a different infant's mother (novel-voice condition) repeating isolated words while a female distracter voice spoke fluently in ...

Previous studies have found that individuals from rural areas in Malaysia and in El Salvador prefer heavier women than individuals from urban areas. Several explanations have been proposed to explain these differences in weight preferences but no study has explored familiarity as a possible explanation. We therefore sought to investigate participants' face preferences while also examining the f...

Information System (IS) planning is one of the most significant activities for IS acquisition in a large organization. The paper presents the planning of IS integration plan of Health Department in database aspects. The main objective of this IS integration is to specify techniques to link all databases in Health Department so that information is interchanged among them seamlessly. The plan was...

The goal of our work is to develop architectures for general intelligent agents that can use large bodies of knowledge to achieve a variety of goals in realistic environments. Our e orts to date have been realized in the Soar architecture. In this paper we provide an overview of plan execution in Soar. Soar is distinguished by its use of learning to compile planning activity automatically into ...

Recent evidence suggests that increased liking of exposed stimuli-a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect-is dependent on experiencing the stimuli in the same context at exposure and test. Three experiments extended this work by examining the effect of presenting target stimuli in single and multiple exposure contexts. Target face stimuli were repeatedly paired with nonsense words, which...

Previous observational research suggests that stretching is contagious in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). Here we report the first experimental evidence of this response through a reanalysis of a previous experiment testing for contagious yawning in this species. Using a repeated measures design, 16 birds were tested as pairs alongside familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics with and withou...

In a previous article, Moore, Rosenberg and Coleman (Brain and Language, 2005, 94, 72-85) reported evidence for significant improvements in phonological awareness in mainstream children following 6 h of exposure to a commercially available phoneme discrimination training programme, but not in a control group. In a follow-up study, we failed to replicate this finding, despite using an almost ide...

The purpose of this article is to suggest a research-based systemic plan for educational researchers, practitioners, and policymakers involved in the change process to implement successful technology integration in the context of teacher education. This article provides a background about reform efforts in science education in the United States in recent years. This article also addresses techn...

We conduct a field study with a US health insurance firm to examine how product customization affects firm’s cost to serve the customers through its call center. In our setting, the product is a complex health insurance plan. Firm incurs substantial cost in serving the customers through its call center, and adjudicating the claims using its information systems. Firm sells either standard plans,...