Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) present atypical sensory processing in the perception of moving stimuli and biological motion. The present study aims to explore the performance of young adults with ASD in a time to contact (TTC) estimation task involving social and non-social stimuli. TTC estimation involves extrapolating the…

Eye tracking technology enables the visualisation of a problem solver's eye movement while working on a problem. The eye movement of experts has been used to draw attention to expert problem solving processes in a bid to teach procedural skills to learners. Such affordances appear as eye movement modelling examples (EMME) in the literature. This…

Eyeblink conditioning is used in many species to study motor learning and make inferences about cerebellar function. However, the discrepancies in performance between humans and other species combined with evidence that volition and awareness can modulate learning suggest that eyeblink conditioning is not merely a passive form of learning that…

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) impacts the quality of life and ability to perform coordinated actions in 5% of school-aged children. The quality of body representations of individuals with DCD has been questioned, but never assessed. We hypothesize that children with DCD have imprecise body representations in the sensory and motor…

Representational competence in science is the ability to generate external representations (e.g. equations, graphs) of real-world phenomena, transform between these representations, and use them in an integrated fashion. Difficulties in achieving representational competence are often considered central to difficulties in learning science.…

This study examined the changes in saccadic amplitude associated with learning a visual sequence. The oculomotor system gradually adjusts saccadic parameters when tracking a visual stimulus, which has a predictable trajectory. In these contexts, the change in saccadic amplitudes leads to predictive fixations. That is, fixations made to a position…

This dissertation describes a program of research encompassing three studies that focused on examining the effects of enhanced expectancies and perceptions of success on motor learning. OPTIMAL theory (Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016) proposes that practice manipulations that enhance a learner's expectations for future successful outcomes lead to…

Examining age differences in motor learning using real-world tasks is often problematic due to task novelty and biomechanical confounds. Here, we investigated how children and adults acquire a novel motor skill in a virtual environment. Participants of three different age groups (9-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults) learned to use their upper…

Joint attention has been extensively studied in the developmental literature because of overwhelming evidence that the ability to socially coordinate visual attention to an object is essential to healthy developmental outcomes, including language learning. The goal of this study was to understand the complex system of sensory-motor behaviors that…

This paper presents a discussion on potential conflicts originated by sensorimotor distractions when learning with mobile phones on-the-move. While research in mobile learning points to the possibility of everywhere, all the time learning; research in the area suggests that tasks performed while on-the-move predominantly require low cognitive…

In contrast to other primates, human children's imitation performance goes from low to high fidelity soon after infancy. Are such changes associated with the development of other forms of learning? We addressed this question by testing 215 children (26-59 months) on two social conditions (imitation, emulation)--involving a demonstration--and two…

Some models of semantic memory claim that items from living and nonliving domains have different feature-type profiles. Data from feature generation and perceptual modality rating tasks were compared to evaluate this claim. Results from two living (animals, fruits/vegetables) and two nonliving (tools, vehicles) categories showed that…

Impaired tool related action in ideomotor apraxia is normally ascribed to loss of sensorimotor memories for habitual actions (engrams), but this account has not been tested against a hypothesis of a general deficit in representation of hand-object spatial relationships. Rapid reaching for familiar tools was compared with reaching for abstract…

Barbara Luborsky explores the commonalities between occupational therapists and Montessori guides, such as their focus on the prepared environment, following the child, task analysis, and multi-sensory learning. She describes many types of sensory processing disorders including their symptoms, treatment, and the many resources and adaptations that…

It is well known that sensorimotor memories are built and updated through experience with objects. These representations are useful to anticipatory and feedforward control processes that preset grip and load forces during lifting. When individuals lift objects with qualities that are not congruent with their memory-derived expectations, feedback…