Background: Visual perception and observational skills are an essential part of Visual Arts education, through which young learners, in the primary school, acquire important and necessary skills to create artworks during their creative projects. These skills provide learners in the primary school the opportunity to overcome their self-imposed…

Objectives: We studied timed-based expectancy as well as general perceptual-motor speed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Methods: In Experiment 1, 11 children with ASD and 11 typically developing children (TD) (6-13 years) completed a binary choice response task in which foreperiod duration predicted the response target's location…

From a perceptual learning perspective, infants use social information (like gaze direction) in a similar way as other information in our physical environment (like object movements) to specify action possibilities. In the current study, we assumed that infants are able to learn an affordance upon observing an adult failing to act out that…

Previous studies have indicated that visual-auditory temporal acuity is reduced in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) in comparison to neurotypicals. In the present study we investigated temporal acuity for all possible bimodal pairings of visual, tactile and auditory information in adults with ASC (n = 18) and a matched control group…

Infants with visual impairment often require additional interaction from adults to reinforce behaviors that lead to competency at mealtimes, but parental and professional confidence in teaching these skills is often limited. In the following collective case study, the authors, a speech/language pathologist (S/LP), occupational therapist (OT), and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the behavioral states of individual children for evidence of responsiveness within and without a multisensory environment (MSE). Three children in the age range of 3-10 years with severe multiple disabilities participated in the study. A single-system ABAB design was used. Participants' behavioral states,…

The goal of this study is to understand the effective learning of the iPad and the use of the system to assist elementary-age students with learning. The research literature promotes different types of assistive technology used for learning and suggests a few applications to use for the iPad. Four students with autism learned to use an iPad tablet…

This study summarises the findings based on two case study sensory gardens in the United Kingdom, in terms of the educational development and social interaction of children with special needs and the staff who care for them. The aim was to observe and record the users' behaviour when engaging with features in the sensory garden. The data…

The present study examined two key aspects of young children's ability to explain human behaviour in a mentalistic way. First, we explored desires that are of a level of difficulty comparable with that of false beliefs. For this purpose, the so-called "alternative desires" were created. Second, we examined how children's psychological…

Observation indicated that children most frequently represent objects by performing actions appropriate to the represented objects. With increasing age, children represent objects without using functional actions and with objects bearing little physical similarity to the represented objects. (Author/DB)

This paper presents two studies of the development of social competencies in infancy. In the first experiment, the central issue investigated was whether facial configuration or height is utilized by infants to respond differentially to children and adults. Five different strangers, a male and a female child, a male and a female adult, and a small…

This paper reports on the development and use of several tools designed to sensitize caregivers to the fact that infants are very different from one another and that caregiving needs to be tailored to the styles and needs of each child. Four approaches were used: (1) having caregivers rate the infants regularly on a small number of rating scales…