Studies have shown that perception of distance, orientation and size can be dissociated from action tasks. The action system seems to possess more veridical, unbiased information than the perceptual/verbal system. The current study examines the nature of the distinction between action and verbal responses in a spatial reasoning task. Participants…

This study examined whether 16-month-old walking infants take the material composition of a handrail into account when assessing its effectiveness as a tool to augment balance. Infants were encouraged to cross from one platform to another via bridges of various widths (10, 20, 40cm) with either a wobbly (foam or latex) or a wooden handrail…

Serial order is fundamental to perception, cognition and behavioral action. Three experiments investigated infants' perception, learning and discrimination of serial order. Four- and 8-month-old infants were habituated to three sequentially moving objects making visible and audible impacts and then were tested on separate test trials for their…

Over half the world's population speaks a tone language, yet infant speech perception research has typically focused on consonants and vowels. Very young infants can discriminate a wide range of native and nonnative consonants and vowels, and then in a process of "perceptual reorganization" over the 1st year, discrimination of most…

As human beings, we can interact with our environment through the sense of touch, which helps us to build an understanding of objects and events. The implications of touch for cognition are recognized by many educators who advocate the use of "hands-on" instruction. But is it possible to know something more completely by touching it? Does touch…

Two studies investigated how flexible children are when asked to switch from one semantic interpretation to another. Three distinctly different standards for the adjectives "big" and "little" were examined: normative, perceptual, and functional. The first study looked at whether some standards are harder than others to represent and whether…

Pressure variations applied by newborns and by infants 1 to 4 months old to rubber nipples were recorded in three different procedures under no-fluid conditions. In the first study, infants were presented for 90 seconds with novel nipples varying in shape and in shape plus material. Results suggested that a developmental trend existed for an…

A study involved the development and testing of a theoretical framework of cerebral specialization in which each hemisphere of the brain is viewed as an independent information processing system. During the study, four sets of experiments were conducted. These involved behavioral as well as electrophysiological measures. According to the…

Development of the ability to classify auditory patterns was studied at grades 2, 6, 10, and 12 and at adult age levels. Both accuracy and feature use in classification were consistent across age; the age changes that did occur appeared to be due to differences in perception rather than process. (JMB)

This study examines the ability of 20 5- and 6-year-old children to determine whether an inference could reliably be made or whether a problem was undecidable. Children were given a random series of 8 decidable and 16 undecidable problems in which they had to determine in which of 2 houses a target character could be found. There were two…

Designed to help children with auditory perceptual problems from fourth through sixth grade, the manual contains essays and exercises to develop listening skills, auditory memory, vocabulary, and imagination. The first section contains instructions to the teacher and the essays which are at three levels of difficulty and intended to be read to the…

In a continuation study, 12 students with dyslexia participated in muscle testing and exercises. Six areas were evaluated via pre- and post-tests: academics (using measures of spelling, reading, and math); parental observations of changes in their children (behavioral, academic or affective); perceptual drawing; oral reading; written language; and…

Research on the emergence of sex differences in spatial ability during early adolescence prompted a meta-analysis of 172 spatial ability studies conducted since 1974. The meta-analysis confirmed that there are actually several spatial abilities, that some types of spatial ability show marked sex differences while others show none, and that spatial…

A discussion of how audiovisual media affect the senses in communication. (HB)