Previous research shows that sensory and motor systems interact during perception, but how these connections among systems are created during development is unknown. The current work exposes young children to novel "verbs" and objects through either (a) actively exploring the objects or (b) by seeing an experimenter interact with the objects.…

The aim of this study is to examine the performance in coding and representing of near-space in relation to vision status (blindness vs. normal vision) and sensory modality (touch vs. vision). Forty-eight children and teenagers participated. Sixteen of the participants were totally blind or had only light perception, 16 were blindfolded sighted…

This study assessed the benefit of a multisensory intervention on the recognition of geometrical shapes in kindergarten children. Two interventions were proposed, both conducted by the teachers and involving exercises focused on the properties of the shapes but differing in the sensory modalities used to explore them. In the "VH"…

Similarity is a fundamental concept in the middle grades. In this study, we applied Vergnaud's theory of conceptual fields to answer the following questions: What concepts-in-action and theorems-in-action about similarity surfaced when students worked in a novel task that required them to enlarge a puzzle piece? How did students use geometric…

This literature review explores visualisation within the context of learning in design, engineering and technology education. The investigation first defines visualisation, providing examples of activities that utilise visualisation skills within an applied field. Then exploration of the mental mechanisms of visualisation used to engage with those…

We investigated whether low-functioning children with autism generalise labels from colour photographs based on sameness of shape, colour, or both. Children with autism and language-matched controls were taught novel words paired with photographs of unfamiliar objects, and then sorted pictures and objects into two buckets according to whether or…

The main purpose of this research was to investigate how Taiwanese grade 6 readers selected and used information from different print (main text, headings, captions) and visual elements (decorational, representational, interpretational) to comprehend a science text through tracking their eye movement behaviors. Six grade 6 students read a double…

The study investigated parafoveal preprocessing by the means of the classical invisible boundary paradigm and a novel manipulation of the parafoveal previews (i.e., visual degradation). Eye movements were investigated on 5-letter target words with constraining (i.e., highly informative) initial letters or similarly constraining final letters.…

Learning complex skills is driven by reinforcement, which facilitates both online within-session gains and retention of the acquired skills. Yet, in ecologically relevant situations, skills are often acquired when mapping between actions and rewarding outcomes is unknown to the learning agent, resulting in reinforcement schedules of a stochastic…

This study investigated the spatial analysis of tactile hierarchical patterns in 110 early-blind children aged 6-8 to 16-18 years, as compared to 90 blindfolded sighted children, in a naming and haptic drawing task. The results revealed that regardless of visual status, young children predominantly produced local responses in both tasks, whereas…

Passenger collaboration offers a potential compensatory strategy to assist older drivers who have difficulty driving in unfamiliar areas (wayfinding). This article describes a survey of 194 healthy, community-dwelling older drivers and their regular passengers to investigate how passengers assist drivers, and to identify the characteristics of…

Human visual perception is a fundamentally relational process: Lightness perception depends on luminance ratios, and depth perception depends on occlusion (difference of depth) cues. Neurons in low-level visual cortex are sensitive to the difference (but not the value itself) of signals, and these differences have to be used to reconstruct the…

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the relation between mathematics and working memory (WM) and to identify possible moderators of this relation including domains of WM, types of mathematics skills, and sample type. A meta-analysis of 110 studies with 829 effect sizes found a significant medium correlation of mathematics and WM, r…

Prosaccade and antisaccade errors in the context of social and nonsocial stimuli were investigated in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 19) a matched control sample (n = 19), and a small sample of youth with obsessive compulsive disorder (n = 9). Groups did not differ in error rates in the prosaccade condition for any stimulus…

This study introduces the new Rotated Colour Cube Test (RCCT) as a measure of object identification and mental rotation using single 3D colour cube images in a matching-to-sample procedure. One hundred 7- to 11-year-old children were tested with aligned or rotated cube models, distracters and targets. While different orientations of distracters…