Retrospective analysis of videotape recordings taken at 9 to 12 months of 11 children with autism, 10 with developmental disabilities, and 11 typically developing children found that nine behavioral items, in combination, discriminated the three groups 94 percent of the time. Results support early identification of autism and that infant…

Direct observation of a child's motor performance by a parent was hypothesized to exert an effect on motor behavior. The presence of a parent observer during practice was hypothesized to exert a depressing effect on learning and a facilitating effect on performance when parent observer was introduced later in practice. Male and female children age…

Investigating the effect of age and temporal placement of a modelled skill on performance of a balance task of 60 boys (seven and nine years old) indicated significant effects of age, temporal appearance of the model, and an interaction of model by age for time on-balance. (Author/PN)

It is argued that the current theoretical orientation of motor behavior research toward information processing is only at the descriptive level. An outline of requirements for motor behaviorists to discover the mental operations that precede motor performance is presented. It is suggested that unless basic knowledge is obtained on how movement…

Compared coupling characteristics of clapping simultaneous with walking or galloping, consistency across trials, and phasing variability among 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds. Found that for walk/clap tasks, children adopted adult-like coupling patterns by age 8 and with the same consistency by age 10. Across age, children became less variable in…

This document reports on research on the effects which the presence of other individuals have on another individual's performance. The experiment was conducted as follows: Selected male and female subjects were given the task of following a blind maze with a stylus. They were tested in performance under three different circumstances, alone, with a…

Demographic data, IQ, achievement, perceptual-motor, behavior ratings, and diagnostic classification (learning, mental, emotional disability or no handicap) were analyzed for all children (N=2002) referred for complete psychological evaluation during one school year in Iowa. Learning disabled children showed a distinct pattern different from…

The concept of field dependence/independence is defined by the behavior patterns of individuals. Those who use predominantly internal cues when making judgments on perceptual tasks are considered field independent; those who use predominantly external cues are considered field dependent. To test whether field dependence is related to anxiety,…