Background: Autistic people without intellectual disabilities have increased perceptual capacity: they can process more information at any given time compared to non-autistic people. We examined whether increased perceptual capacity is evident across the autistic spectrum (i.e. for autistic people with intellectual disabilities) and whether it is…

Neurologically healthy adults display a reliable but slight leftward spatial bias, and this bias appears to change with age (Jewell & McCourt, 2000). Studies using line bisection and the landmark task to investigate pseudoneglect in participants over 60 years of age have shown suppression and near reversal of the leftward response bias. The…

Autism involves various perceptual benefits and deficits, but it is unclear if the disorder also involves anomalous audiovisual integration. To address this issue, we compared the performance of high-functioning adults with autism and matched controls on experiments investigating the audiovisual integration of speech, spatiotemporal relations, and…

The article describes a case study of children and young people's participation and the attendant effects on professional practice and child-adult relations. The authors consider the findings under four headings: professional learning, child-adult relations, childhood memories and the spatial dimensions of change. Evidence indicates that adults…

Compared head circumference and interaural distance in infants between birth and 22 weeks of age and in a small sample of preschool children and adults. Calculated changes in interaural time differences according to age. Found a large shift in distance. (SKC)

Examined how children's and adults' initial conceptions of objects and space influence predictions about the physical world, but lead the naive person to misconstrue a dynamic event. Found that participants proficiently anticipated where an oscillating screen would contact a hidden object, but underestimated the distance until contact.…

Six experiments assessed young children's spatial orientation relative to their imagined surroundings. The experiments found that children as young as 3.5 years were able, like adults, to accurately walk along a path that replicated the route between their seat and the teacher's desk in their preschool classroom. (MDM)

Three experiments with observers aged 6 to 21 years of age examined the integration of shape information over successive glances. Results indicated age-related improvements in the sequential integration of shape information, both when integration occurs through successive glimpses over space and when information is separated only in time. (HOD)

An experimental test battery designed to measure several perceptual abilities was administered to 1,368 (51.8% male) paying clients of the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation (JOCRF) in an effort to identify and measure three perceptual abilities: (1) flexibility of closure; (2) speed of closure; and (3) spatial scanning. Subjects, who ranged in…

Researchers disagree not only about the existence or magnitude of sex-related differences in spatial perception, but also about the determinants of such differences. Training in three distinct spatial tasks was provided in an attempt to destablize individual and sex-related differences, while exploring the relative contributions of biological and…

Four experiments examined the flexibility and stability with which children and adults organize locations into categories based on their spatiotemporal experience with locations. Seven-, 9-, 11-year-olds, and adults learned the locations of 20 objects in an open, square box. During learning, participants experienced the locations in four…

Children and adults performed a divided attention task and two selective attention tasks with shapes that were either spatially integrated or separated. Results indicate that integrated stimuli are initially perceived as wholes, and separated stimuli as features, at all ages. (BC)

Four experiments examined the spatial orientation of children who walked while wearing a blindfold. Children and adults viewed a target, were guided blindfolded to a new point, and then aimed a pointer at the target. Route complexity, but not number of targets or time delay, affected spatial orientation. Some age differences were observed. (BC)

This report, arising from a 1991 meeting, provides an update to two of the six areas covered in the 1989 long-term plan of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. These include: (1) balance and the vestibular system; and (2) language and language impairments. For each area, the state of the art is reviewed, recent…

Computational models of infant categorization often fail to elaborate the transitional mechanisms that allow infants to achieve adult performance. In this article, we apply a successful connectionist model of adult category learning to developmental data. The Supervised and Unsupervised Stratified Adaptive Incremental Network (SUSTAIN) model is…