Three experiments with a total of 87 human observers revealed an upper-left spatial bias in the initial movement of gaze during visual search. The bias was present whether or not the explicit control of gaze was required for the task. This bias may be part of a search strategy that competed with the fixed-gaze parallel search strategy hypothesized by Durgin [Durgin, F. H. (2003). Translation and competition among internal representations in a reverse Stroop effect. Perception &Psychophysics, 65, 367-378.] for this task. When the spatial probabilities of the search target were manipulated either in accord with or in opposition to the existing upper-left bias, two orthogonal factors of interference in the latency data were differentially affected. The two factors corresponded to two different forms of representation and search. Target probabilities consistent with the gaze bias encouraged opportunistic serial search (including gaze shifts), while symmetrically opposing target probabilities produced latency patterns more consistent with parallel search based on a sensory code.

This paper describes the structure, implementation, and impact evaluation of a Programming Support Centre for engineering and computing students. The main focus of this centre is to provide a positive, supportive atmosphere where students can voluntarily seek one-to-one assistance with programming difficulties. The support offered is specifically structured to nurture and leverage each student's motivation for taking a programming course whilst providing them with individually tailored advice and practical help.A qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the centre's operation is presented, together with analysis of statistics on student motivation. The results of this research suggest that the newly developed programming support centre has had a positive impact on student learning.

The relationship between parental background and children's educational outcomes has been a dominant theme within the sociology of education. There has been an on-going debate as to the relative merits of explanations which focus on the role of socio-cultural reproduction and those which focus on rational choice. However, many empirical studies within the social stratification tradition fail to allow for children's own agency in shaping the relationship between social background and schooling outcomes. This paper draws on the first wave of a large-scale longitudinal study of over 8,000 nine-year-old children in Ireland, which combines information from parents, school principals, teachers and children themselves. Both social class and parental education are found to have significant effects on reading and mathematics test scores among nine year olds. These effects are partly mediated by home-based educational resources and activities, parents' educational expectations for their child, and parents' formal involvement in the school. More importantly, children's own engagement with, and attitudes to, school significantly influence their academic performance. The influence of children's own attitudes and actions can thus reinforce or mitigate the effect of social background factors. The analysis therefore provides a bridge between the large body of research Child Ind Res (2010) 3:85-104 on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the emerging research and policy literature on children's rights.

No abstract

Discontinuities in any information bearing signal serve to represent much of the vital or interesting content in that signal. A sharp loud noise in a movie could be a gun, or something breaking. In sports like tennis, cricket or snooker/pool it would indicate a point scoring event. In both cases the discontinuity is likely to be semantically relevant without further inference being necessary, once a particular domain is adopted. This paper discusses the importance of temporal motion discontinuities in inferring events in visual media. Two particular application domains are considered: content based audio/video synchronisation and event spotting in observational Psychology.