As places of learning, schools inevitably foreground cognition. Neglected in schools and in the literature is the body, often an inconvenience or barrier to learning rather than a site of perception and understanding. Where the body is considered, it is primarily concerned with pedagogy and children rather than analysing the broad range of…

Forces are experienced in actions on objects. The mechanoreceptor system is stimulated by proximal forces in interactions with objects, and experiences of force occur in a context of information yielded by other sensory modalities, principally vision. These experiences are registered and stored as episodic traces in the brain. These stored…

Biological motion is easily perceived by neurotypical observers when encoded in point-light displays. Some but not all relevant research shows significant deficits in biological motion perception among those with ASD, especially with respect to emotional displays. We tested adults with and without ASD on the perception of masked biological motion…

In humans, visual information is processed via parallel channels: the parvocellular (P) pathway analyzes color and form information, whereas the magnocellular (M) stream plays an important role in motion analysis. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show superior performance in processing fine detail, but impaired performance in…

Preschoolers who explore objects haptically often fail to recognize those objects in subsequent visual tests. This suggests that children may represent qualitatively different information in vision and haptics and/or that children's haptic perception may be poor. In this study, 72 children (2 1/2-5 years of age) and 20 adults explored unfamiliar…

The present study examined the effect of perceived motion-in-depth on temporal interval perception. We required subjects to estimate the length of a short empty interval starting from the offset of a first marker and ending with the onset of a second marker. The size of the markers was manipulated so that the subjects perceived a visual object as…

Recent research has demonstrated that Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects the visual sensory pathways, producing a variety of visual deficits, including the capacity to perceive structure-from-motion (SFM). Because the sensory areas of the adult brain are known to retain a large degree of plasticity, the present study was conducted to explore whether…

Visual information can specify spatial layout with respect to the observer (egocentric) or with respect to an external frame of reference (allocentric). People can use both of these types of visual spatial information to guide their hands. The question arises if movements based on egocentric and movements based on allocentric visual information…

When a target is enclosed by a 4-dot mask that persists after the target disappears, target identification is worse than it is when the mask terminates with the target. This masking effect is attributed to object substitution masking (OSM). Previewing the mask, however, attenuates OSM. This study investigated specific conditions under which mask…

A large body of research has reported visual perception deficits in both people with dyslexia and autistic spectrum disorders. In this study, we compared form and motion coherence detection between a group of adults with high-functioning autism, a group with Asperger's disorder, a group with dyslexia, and a matched control group. It was found that…

Impressions of force are commonplace in the visual perception of objects interacting. It is proposed that these impressions have their source in haptically mediated experiences of exertion of force in actions on objects. Visual impressions of force in interactions between objects occur by a kind of generalization of the proprioceptive impression…

The present study examines the contributions of vision for perception processes in action. To this end, the influence of allocentric information on different action components (i.e., the selection of an appropriate mode of action, the pre-planning and online control of movement kinematics) is assessed. Participants (n = 10) were presented with a…

Converging evidence has shown that action observation and execution are tightly linked. The observation of an action directly activates an equivalent internal motor representation in the observer (direct matching). However, whether direct matching is primarily driven by basic perceptual features of the observed movement or is influenced by more…

Two experiments investigated how 16-20-week-old infants visually tracked an object that oscillated on a horizontal trajectory with a centrally placed occluder. To determine the principles underlying infants' tendency to shift gaze to the exiting side before the object arrives, occluder width, oscillation frequency, and motion amplitude were…

Asperger Syndrome (AS), a condition on the autistic spectrum, is characterized by deficits in the ability to use social cues to infer mental state information. Few studies have examined whether these deficits might be understood in terms of differences in visual information processing. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance…