Music performance requires high levels of motor control. Professional musicians use body movements not only to accomplish and help technical efficiency, but to shape expressive interpretation. Here, we recorded motion and audio data of twenty participants performing four musical fragments varying in the degree of technical difficulty to analyze…

Much research has focused on the expression of voluntary motion (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study contributes to this body of research by comparing how children (three to ten years) and adults narrated short, animated cartoons in English and German (SATELLITE-FRAMED languages) vs. French (VERB-FRAMED). The cartoons showed agents…

Sensory processing difficulties affect the development of sensorimotor skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the effect of sensory information on postural control is unclear in the ASD adult population. The present study examined the effect of visual information on postural control as well as the attentional demands…

Recent studies about learning and instruction use cognitive load measurement to pay attention to the human cognitive resources and to the consumption of these resources during the learning process. In order to validate different measures of cognitive load for different cognitive load factors, the present study compares three different methods of…

A growing body of experimental work highlights the potential value of unstructured, interactive, or spontaneous motions, including gestures, dance, shifting body postures, physical object-manipulation, drawing, etc. to favorably impact creative performance. However, despite these favorable findings, to our knowledge, no systematic review has been…

Previous studies have shown a robust bias to express the goal path over the source path when describing events ("the bird flew into the pitcher," rather than "… out of the bucket into the pitcher"). Motivated by linguistic theory, this study manipulated the causal structure of events (specifically, making the source cause the…

The long-term physical activity in specific sport activities can change the quality of mental rotation performance. This study investigates the influence of "Life Kinetik"--a motion program with tasks of cognition and motor coordination--on mental rotation performance of 44 primary school-aged children. While the experimental group…

Understanding verbs typically activates posterior temporal regions and, in some circumstances, motion perception area V5. However, the nature and role of this activation remains unclear: does language alone indeed activate V5? And are posterior temporal representations modality-specific motion representations, or supra-modal motion-independent…

This article focuses on the impact of intentionality on goal directed locomotion in healthy and autistic children. Closely linked with emotions and motivation, it is directly connected with movement planning. Is planning only preserved when the goal of the action appears motivating for healthy and autistic children? Is movement programming similar…

Previous studies have asked whether visual sensitivity and attentional processing in deaf signers are enhanced or altered as a result of their different sensory experiences during development, i.e., auditory deprivation and exposure to a visual language. In particular, deaf and hearing signers have been shown to exhibit a right visual field/left…

Previous research indicates children reason in different ways about horizontal motion and motion in fall. At the same time, their understanding of motion down inclines appears to result from an interaction between horizontal and vertical motion understanding. However, this interaction is still poorly understood. Understanding of speed change may…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have native exposure to a sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) have received almost no scientific attention. This paper reports the first studies on a sample of five native-signing children (four deaf children of deaf parents and one hearing child of deaf parents; ages 4;6 to 7;5)…

Kinematic recordings in a reach and drop task were compared between 12 preschool children with autism without mental retardation and 12 gender and age-matched normally developing children. Our aim was to investigate whether motor anomalies in autism may depend more on a planning ability dysfunction or on a motor control deficit. Planning and…

In mathematic courses, construction of some concepts by the students in a meaningful way may be complicated. In such circumstances, to embody the concepts application of the required technologies may reinforce learning process. Onset of learning process over daily life events of the student's environment may lure their attention and may…

Humans have an evolved embodied cognition that equips them to deal easily with the natural movements of object manipulations. Hence, learning a manipulative task is generally more effective when watching animations that show natural motions of the task, rather than equivalent static pictures. The present study was completed to explore this…