Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has a significant impact on children’s social, emotional, and academic performance in school, and as such, teachers are in a good position to provide evidence-based interventions to help ensure optimal adjustment of their students. The current study examined teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about ADHD, their self-reported use of evidence-based instructional and behaviour management strategies in the classroom, and the relationships between knowledge, beliefs, and classroom practices. It was expected that teachers would have a moderate amount of knowledge about ADHD, mixed positive and negative beliefs about ADHD, that they would regularly use less intensive evidence-based behaviour management strategies, and that more knowledge and positive beliefs about ADHD would be correlated with higher use of effective classroom practices. Web-based questionnaires were completed by 113 teachers from six school boards across Nova Scotia. Results indicated that the mean teacher knowledge score was ~68% and that they had more knowledge about symptoms/diagnosis of ADHD and less knowledge about general ADHD facts and about evidence-based treatments. Teachers had slightly more positive than negative beliefs about ADHD and reported occasional use of evidence-based instructional and behaviour management practices in their classrooms. There was a significant correlation between teachers’ beliefs about ADHD and their use of evidence-based behaviour management practices, but there was no significant correlation between specific ADHD knowledge and classroom practices. Information gained from this study has implications for the content of ADHD teacher training and professional development programs as well as for school psychologists and those in teacher consultation roles.

A number of studies have presented evidence that middle spatial frequencies (SFs), between about 8 and 16 cycles per face width (c/fw), provide information that is more useful for face recognition than are other frequency ranges (Bachmann, 1991;Costen, Parker, & Craw, 1994Gold, Bennett, & Sekuler, 1999;Näsänen, 1999;Parker & Costen, 2001;Rolls, Baylis, & Hasselmo, 1987). On the basis of these data, it has been suggested that band-pass spatial filtering may be the first stage of feature extraction during visual recognition (Näsänen, 1999). That is, the visual information reaching purported face recognition areas might be filtered to preferentially represent middle SFs. In the extreme, it is possible that visual information reaching face recognition areas of the brain is first reduced to only middle SF ranges prior to further analysis. In theory, this filtering could help to minimize the processing load placed on face recognition mechanisms by discarding low and high SFs.A few recent studies have cast doubt on the idea of an absolute advantage for middle SFs in face recognition by showing that recognition performance is little affected by the range of frequencies contained in face stimuli, so long as both comparison and test stimuli are filtered in the same way (Collin, Liu, Troje, McMullen, & Chaudhuri, 2004;Kornowski & Petersik, 2003;Liu, Collin, Rainville, & Chaudhuri, 2000). These findings seem incompatible with the idea that middle SFs provide the most useful information for face recognition. If this were the case, one would expect some degree of performance loss when attempting to match two faces that contain no SFs from inside the middle band, relative to matching two faces with SFs from within the middle band. However, this difference has not been observed. Instead, Collin and colleagues (Collin et al., 2004) have suggested that a broad range of SFs may be useful for any visual task and that the range will depend on such task characteristics as similarity between learned and tested stimuli. This is a view echoed by Schyns and colleagues (Schyns, 1998;Schyns & Gosselin, 2003), who suggested that a wide range of SFs may be used in any given task and that there is a top-down control of which SFs are accessed in an image.In the following, we first will discuss two sets of studies that respectively provide evidence for and against the idea of a middle-band advantage in face recognition. We then will present a pair of experiments that examined how the differing task demands of these two sets of studies might lead to different conclusions about the role of SFs in face recognition.Rolls and colleagues (Rolls et al., 1987) provided some of the earliest evidence that face recognition might rely preferentially on middle SFs. They recorded activity of face-sensitive neurons in the macaque superior sulcus in response to band-pass filtered face images. They found that these neurons responded most strongly to images containing frequencies between 4 and 32 c/fw. Bachmann (1991) provided the first clue that these physiolog...