Nora Turoman

University of Geneva | UNIGE · Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences (FAPSE)

Frontiers for Young Minds: New Discovery The world is a distracting place – full of shapes and colors, sounds, and smells that constantly excite our senses. Sometimes, things that distract us can stimulate multiple senses at once. When the TV is switched on while we are trying to read, moving images on the screen are accompanied by sounds. But you...

In real-world environments information is typically multisensory, and objects are a primary unit of information processing. Object recognition and action necessitates attentional selection of task-relevant from among task-irrelevant objects. However, the brain and cognitive mechanisms governing these processes remain not well understood. Here, we d...

Visual attention skills shape learning, but how do these abilities interact with multisensory processes that must contribute to shaping literacy and numeracy skills? We investigated how involuntary multisensory integration and top-down visual attention develop together during primary school and how these processes contribute to reading and basic ma...

Real-world environments are full of information that stimulates multiple senses at a time, i.e., multisensory information. When such multisensory information is not relevant for our goals, it can have a detrimental distracting effect on our cognitive processes. Distraction effects should presumably be especially large for children, as they are typi...

There is growing recognition that working memory and selective attention are highly related. However, a key function of selective attention – ignoring distractors – is much less understood in the domain of working memory. In the attention domain, it is now clear that distractors’ task relevance and stimulation of multiple senses at the same time (i...

Developmental improvements in working memory (WM) maintenance predict many real-world outcomes, including educational attainment. It is thus critical to understand which WM mechanisms support these observed behavioral improvements, and how WM maintenance strategies might change through development. One challenge is that specific WM neural mechanism...

Background: The quality of COVID-19 preprints should be considered with great care, as we have seen that their contents can influence public policy. Efforts to improve preprint quality have mostly focused on introducing quick peer review, but surprisingly little has been done to calibrate the public’s evaluation of preprints and their contents. The...

Background : The quality of COVID-19 preprints should be considered with great care, as their contents can influence public policy. Efforts to improve preprint quality have mostly focused on introducing quick peer review, but surprisingly little has been done to calibrate the public’s evaluation of preprints and their contents. The PRECHECK project...

Dashboard-mounted touchscreen tablets are now common in vehicles. Screen/phone use in cars likely shifts drivers’ attention away from the road and contributes to risk of accidents. Nevertheless, vision is subject to multisensory influences from other senses. Haptics may help maintain or even increase visual attention to the road, while still allowi...

The current paper presents an overview of the workflow of the Working Memory, Cognition and Development lab (WomCogDev) lab at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, as an example of how Open Science principles can be applied in a developmental psychology lab. We describe the importance and challenges of applying Open Science practices in developme...

The current paper presents an overview of the workflow of the Working Memory, Cognition and Development (WomCogDev) lab at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, as an example of how Open Science principles can be applied in a developmental psychology lab. We describe the importance and challenges of applying Open Science practices in developmental...

Dashboard-mounted touchscreen tablets are now common in vehicles. Screen/phone use in cars likely shifts drivers’ attention away from the road and contributes to risk of accidents. Nevertheless, vision is subject to multisensory influences from other senses. Haptics may help maintain or even increase visual attention to the road, while still allowi...

Research on attentional control has largely focused on single senses and the importance of behavioural goals in controlling attention. However, everyday situations are multisensory and contain regularities, both likely influencing attention. We investigated how visual attentional capture is simultaneously impacted by top-down goals, the multisensor...

Schooling may shape children's abilities to control their attention, but it is unclear if this impact extends from control over visual objects to encompass multisensory objects, which are more typical of everyday environments. We compared children across three primary school grades (Swiss first, third, and fifth grades) on their performance on a ga...

Outside the laboratory, people need to pay attention to relevant objects that are typically multisensory, but it remains poorly understood how the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms develop. We investigated when adult-like mechanisms controlling one’s attentional selection of visual and multisensory objects emerge across childhood. Five-, 7-, and...

Abstract Tasks designed to study adult attention skills have helped clarify the development of such skills in childhood. We recently demonstrated how children develop goal-based visual and stimulus-driven multisensory attention. Here, we tested whether children improve these attention skills within a single testing session, and whether this depend...

Schooling may shape children’s abilities to control their attention, but it is unclear if this impact extends from control over visual objects to encompass multisensory objects, which are more typical of everyday environments. We compared children across three primary school grades (Swiss 1 st , 3 rd , and 5 th grade) on their performance on a comp...

A large body of research on connections between sensory modalities has shown that deep connections exist between sound and vision, such that people have a tendency to associate certain sounds with certain visual properties, including line-drawn shapes. While recognising the role of written language in audio-visual associations, previous research ha...

Research on attentional control has largely focused on single senses and the importance of one’s behavioural goals in controlling attention. However, everyday situations are multisensory and contain regularities, both likely influencing attention. We investigated how visual attentional capture is simultaneously impacted by top-down goals, multisens...

Attentional control outside of the laboratory operates in multisensory settings, but the development of mechanisms subserving such control remains poorly understood. We investigated when, over the course of childhood, adult-like attentional control mechanisms begin to emerge. Children aged five, seven, and nine were compared with adults on behaviou...

The aim of educational neuroscience research is to better understand the neurocognitive processes shaping how developing brains learn. We now understand that children’s ability to learn and deploy new skills depends critically on their capacity to promote the processing of task-relevant information and suppress the goal-irrelevant information (i.e....

In real-world environments, information is typically multisensory, and objects are a primary unit of information processing. Object recognition and action necessitates attentional selection of task-relevant from among task-irrelevant objects. However, brain and cognitive mechanisms governing attentional selection of multisensory objects remain poor...

Sensory substitution is an effective means to rehabilitate many visual functions after visual impairment or blindness. Tactile information, for example, is particularly useful for functions such as reading, mental rotation, shape recognition, or exploration of space. Extant haptic technologies typically rely on real physical objects or pneumaticall...

Everyday vision includes the detection of stimuli, figure-ground segregation, as well as object localization and recognition. Such processes must often surmount impoverished or noisy conditions; borders are perceived despite occlusion or absent contrast gradients. These illusory contours (ICs) are an example of so-called mid-level vision, with an e...

Despite the rapid growth of research on the crossmodal correspondence between visually presented shapes and basic tastes (e.g., sweet, sour, bitter, and salty), most studies that have been published to date have focused on shape contour (roundness/angularity). Meanwhile, other important features, such as symmetry, as well as the underlying mechanis...

In three experiments, we asked whether diverse scripts contain interpretable information about the speech sounds they represent. When presented with a pair of unfamiliar letters, adult readers correctly guess which is /i/ (the ‘ee’ sound in ‘feet’), and which is /u/ (the ‘oo’ sound in ‘shoe’) at rates higher than expected by chance, as shown in a l...

Welcome to this Special Issue of Array: Proceedings of Si15, the 2nd International Symposium on Sound and Interactivity. The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23 August 2015. The festival events included five invited artist performances, two scientific keynotes and two days o...

Turoman N & Styles SJ. (2016). How well do humans capture the sounds of speech in writing? In Lindborg PM & Styles SJ (Eds.), ICMA Array, vol 2016, Special Issue: Proceedings of Si15, Singapore, August 2015, pp 43–44. Abstract. A large body of research on connections between sensory modalities has shown that deep connections exist between sound an...

Turoman N & Styles SJ. (2016). How well do humans capture the sounds of speech in writing? In Lindborg PM & Styles SJ (Eds.), ICMA Array, vol 2016, Special Issue: Proceedings of Si15, Singapore, August 2015, pp 43–44. Abstract. A large body of research on connections between sensory modalities has shown that deep connections exist between sound an...

A large body of research on connections between sensory modalities has shown that deep connections exist between sound and vision, such that people have a tendency to associate certain sounds with certain visual properties, including line-­drawn shapes. While recognising the role of written language in audio-­visual associations, previous research...