An ability to perceive tactile and visual stimuli in a common spatial frame of reference is a crucial ingredient in forming a representation of one's own body and the interface between bodily and external space. In this study, the authors investigated young infants' abilities to perceive colocation between tactile and visual stimuli presented on…

South Africa consists of developed and developing contexts. This article reports on a study undertaken to determine the effect of a Perceptual--motor Intervention Programme in learning readiness of Grade R learners from deprived environments. Le Roux's Group Test for School Readiness was used as baseline assessments to establish the school…

The spatial-temporal association indicates that time is represented spatially along a left-to-right line. It is unclear whether the spatial-temporal association is mainly related to a perceptual or a motor component. In addition, the spatial-temporal association is not consistently found using a time reproduction task. Our rationale for this…

Historically, the bodily senses have often been regarded as impeccable sources of spatial information and as being the teacher of vision. Here, the authors report that the haptic perception of slope by means of the foot is greatly exaggerated. The exaggeration is present in verbal as well as proprioceptive judgments. It is shown that this…

We argue that 4 fundamental gestalt phenomena in perception apply to the control of motor action. First, a motor gestalt, like a perceptual gestalt, is holistic in the sense that it is processed as a single unit. This notion is consistent with reaction time results indicating that all gestures for a brief unit of action must be programmed prior to…

D. R. Proffitt and colleagues (e. g., D. R. Proffitt, J. Stefanucci, T. Banton, & W. Epstein, 2003) have suggested that objects appear farther away if more effort is required to act upon them (e.g., by having to throw a ball). The authors attempted to replicate several findings supporting this view but found no effort-related effects in a variety…

In 1988, 59 Kindergarten students were studied to determine the effect of "shadowing" on perceptual-motor learning. Shadowing is a method whereby the use of one's shadow provides visual feedback. The method developed from observing children's natural curiosity in creating shadows. Illuminated by sunlight outdoors or overhead projectors…

This study investigated the role that visual tracking plays in coupling rhythmic limb movements to an environmental rhythm. Two experiments were conducted in which participants swung a hand-held pendulum while tracking an oscillating stimulus or while keeping their eyes fixed on a stationary location directly above an oscillating stimulus. It…

Superior performance by adventitiously blind Ss relative to congenitally blind Ss appeared on tasks where the stimuli were complex, familiar and/or apprehenced with arm's length of the body, but not on tasks where the stimuli were relatively simple, novel, and/or apprehenced only through locomotion. (Author/MC)

Used a set of six measures to analyze both the products and process of spatial grouping in 40 children between the ages of 18 and 42 months. Results confirmed and elaborated on previously established developmental findings for each measure. (SKC)

Investigated preschoolers' understanding of two distance principles: the direct-indirect and the same-plus principle. Children did better on tasks relevant to the principles than on principle-irrelevant tasks. Concluded that even young children conceive of distance as fixed intervals. (SKC)

Previous research with both brain-damaged and neurologically intact populations has demonstrated that the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) is superior to the left cerebral hemisphere (LH) at detecting anomalies (or incongruities) in objects (Ramachandran, 1995; Smith, Tays, Dixon, & Bulman-Fleming, 2002). The current research assesses whether the RH…

Imaginal perspective switches are often considered to be difficult, because they call for additional cognitive transformations of object coordinates (transformation hypothesis). Recent research suggests that problems can also result from conflicts between incompatible sensorimotor and cognitive object location codes during response specification…

The purpose of this study was to attempt to train the horizontality concept in a group of first graders who were non-operational on the horizontality concept but transitional on what Piaget has termed the precursor concepts of distance and length conservation. There were two groups of subjects (training and control), all of whom had failed a…