Sense enables babies to perceive the physical and chemical changes that occur in the external environment. It occurs as a result of the dynamic interaction of sensory stimuli with sensory receptors in the eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin. The stimuli that newborns see, touch, and hear affect their brain development. The brain develops faster in…

Learning to categorize perceptually similar stimuli can result in people becoming more sensitive to differences along perceptual dimensions that are relevant to category membership and/or less sensitive to equivalent differences along irrelevant perceptual dimensions. These effects of acquired distinctiveness and acquired equivalence may be caused…

This systematic review aims to (1) establish how different types of assessment measure sensory modulation difficulties in children with ADHD, and (2) to examine whether sensory modulation difficulties can be separated from ADHD symptomatology. The review protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42018091730). PRISMA guidelines were used. Three…

Informed by the biological sensitivity to the context (BSC) theory, this multimethod, longitudinal study sought to examine how family context may be associated with the development of child sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) over a year. Participants were 235 young children (M[subscript age] = 2.97 at the first measurement occasion, 55.3% were…

This review challenges the traditional interpretation of infants' and young children's responses to three types of potentially "fear-inducing" stimuli--snakes and spiders, heights, and strangers. The traditional account is that these stimuli are the objects of infants' earliest developing fears. We present evidence against the…

An experiment with human participants established a novel procedure to assess perceptual learning with tactile stimuli. Participants received unsupervised exposure to two sandpaper surfaces differing in roughness (A and B). The ability of the participants to discriminate between the stimuli was subsequently assessed on a same/different test. It…

This pilot study investigated the efficacy of Qigong Sensory Training, a parent-implemented tactile intervention, in improving sensory processing and self-regulation in children with or at-risk for autism who were enrolled in early intervention. A pretest-posttest, single-subject design was implemented with three families. After 5 months, atypical…

Evidence that learning rule-based (RB) and information-integration (II) category structures can be dissociated across different experimental variables has been used to support the view that such learning is supported by multiple learning systems. Across 4 experiments, we examined the effects of 2 variables, the delay between response and feedback…

The aim of our study was to explore possible differences in estimation of odor pleasantness in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to controls. Thirty-five patients with Asperger's syndrome and high functioning autism (mean age 10.8 [plus or minus] 3.6 years; 31 boys) were compared with 35 healthy control subjects (mean age 10.4…

To explore early lexical development, the authors examined infants' sensitivity to changes in spoken syllables and objects given different temporal relations between syllable-object pairings. In Experiment 1, they habituated 2-month-olds to 1 syllable, /tah/ or /gah/, paired with an object in "synchronous" (utterances coincident with object…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have documented sensory processing difficulties across the lifespan; however there is limited empirical support for the sensory-based interventions that have become ubiquitous with the population. This study was conducted to address this need and examine the effect of sensory-based interventions on…

Playing with toys as a means of environmental engagement has long been considered important in early child development (D. J. Messer, D. Rachford, M. E. McCarthy, & L. J. Yarrow, 1987; M. Wolery, M. G. Werts, & M. Holcombe, 1994). However, children with highly significant disabilities often engage in toy play less frequently than their peers…

Considerable research has been devoted to investigating learning without awareness. Burke and Roodenrys [Burke, D., & Roodenrys, S. (2000). Implicit learning in a simple cued reaction-time task. "Learning and Motivation" 31, 364-380] developed a simple learning task in which a cue shape predicts the arrival of a target shape (to which subjects…

Theories of autism have proposed that a bias towards low-level perceptual information, or a featural/surface-biased information-processing style, may compromise higher-level language processing in such individuals. Two experiments, utilizing linguistic stimuli with competing low-level/perceptual and high-level/semantic information, tested…

Four experiments examined the perceptual features used by 4.5- to 11.5-month olds to individuate objects involved in occlusion events. Results indicated that 4.5-month olds used shape and size features to individuate objects in occlusion events. By 7.5 months, infants used pattern, and by 11.5 months, they used color to reason about object…