Multisensory experiences crucially contribute to the development of infants' ability to match audio-visual (A-V) information. This study investigated two-day-old newborns' ability to bind non-verbal, naturally occurring, experienced A-V stimuli. Our results demonstrate that, when presented with experienced stimuli (yawns and hiccups) within an…

Since birth, infants develop the ability to perceive a wide range of intersensory relations among various kinds of amodal temporal information. This study addresses the development of the ability to perceive duration-based intersensory relations. Three groups of infants, four, seven and 10 months old, participated in two trials of an intersensory…

Four experiments used a sensory preconditioning protocol to examine how a dangerous context influences learning about innocuous events. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, rats were exposed to presentations of a tone followed immediately or 20-sec later by presentations of a light. These tone-light pairings occurred in a context that was either familiar…

Previous studies have indicated that visual-auditory temporal acuity is reduced in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) in comparison to neurotypicals. In the present study we investigated temporal acuity for all possible bimodal pairings of visual, tactile and auditory information in adults with ASC (n = 18) and a matched control group…

Results from previous research studies suggest that inclusive settings benefit all learners. However, general education teachers often do not have built in supports within the classroom to meet the needs of students with disabilities. Implementing a sensory diet curriculum (SDC) is one instructional practice that addresses needs of students with…

The primary focus of this research study was to examine the benefit of a using a multimodal approach to speech sound correction with preschool children. The approach uses the auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic modalities and includes a unique, interactive visual focus that attempts to provide a visual representation of a phonemic category. The…

Previous studies have shown that infants, including newborns, can match previously unseen and unheard human faces and vocalizations. More recently, it has been reported that infants as young as 4 months of age also can match the faces and vocalizations of other species raising the possibility that such broad multisensory perceptual tuning is…

We explored the amount and timing of temporal synchrony necessary to facilitate prenatal perceptual learning using an animal model, the bobwhite quail. Quail embryos were exposed to various audiovisual combinations of a bobwhite maternal call paired with patterned light during the late stages of prenatal development and were tested postnatally for…

Examined rate-based intersensory matching in infants by habituating them to concordant or discordant auditory-visual stimuli. Found a preference for the visual stimulus that moved at a novel velocity, indicating that the temporal attributes of the visual component dominated responsiveness. Found only limited evidence of intersensory matching. (WP)

In this article, we examine the extent to which children with autism and children with learning difficulties can be discriminated from their responses to different patterns of sensory stimuli. Using an adapted version of the Short Sensory Profile (SSP), sensory processing was compared in 34 children with autism to 33 children with typical…

Tested the ability of 3.5-month-old infants to detect audiovisual relations. Results demonstrated infants' visual recovery to changes in temporal synchrony of sight and sound and in composition of objects. Infants did not demonstrate visual recovery to changes in the relationship between pitch and color or shape. (BC)

Information presented concurrently and redundantly to 2 or more senses (intersensory redundancy) has been shown to recruit attention and promote perceptual learning of amodal stimulus properties in animal embryos and human infants. This study examined whether the facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy also extends to the domain of memory.…

The eye movements of infants, between 4 and 11 weeks old, were recorded while they viewed either a representation of a face or nonface stimulus. (Author/SB)

This study considered two questions about infants' perception of affective expressions: (1) Can infants distinguish between happiness and anger on the basis of facial motion information alone? (2) Can infants detect a correspondence between happy and angry facial and vocal expressions by different people? A total of 40 infants of 7 months of age…

Compares the response of preterm and full-term infants to moving objects presented with or without accompanying sound. Finds differences in attention and recognition between full-terms and preterms at three months of age. At six months of age only high-risk preterms showed different responses than full-terms, suggesting that they are at a…