How do infants learn to perceive the backs of objects that they see only from a limited viewpoint? Infants' 3-dimensional object completion abilities emerge in conjunction with developing motor skills--independent sitting and visual-manual exploration. Infants at 4.5 to 7.5 months of age (n = 28) were habituated to a limited-view object and tested…

Animal studies demonstrate that maternal touch and contact regulate infant stress, and handling during periods of maternal deprivation attenuates the stress response. To measure the effects of touch on infant stress reactivity during simulated maternal deprivation, 53 dyads were tested in two paradigms: still-face (SF) and still-face with maternal…

This article considers the implications of a small-scale research project, undertaken by the authors, which used the example of the Massage in Schools Programme (a simple peer massage programme) to ascertain whether the planned use of touch-based activity can support the growth of social and emotional skills in the primary classroom. Such claims…

Everyone is in the midst of an explosion in the popularity of knitting. Shifting the traditional stereotype of what a knitter should be, the youth of today have taken up knitting as a tactile and embodied form of connectivity. In a rapidly changing and unpredictable world, characterized by, among other factors, the unprecedented expansion of…

The use of weighted vests for children with autism spectrum disorders and developmental disabilities is a common practice as part of sensory integration therapy programs. The purpose of the current investigation was to extend the research on the use of weighted vests for children with autism and developmental delays in a methodologically rigorous…

Recent research that assessed spatial judgments about multisensory stimuli suggests that humans integrate multisensory inputs in a statistically optimal manner by weighting each input by its normalized reciprocal variance. Is integration similarly optimal when humans judge the temporal properties of bimodal stimuli? Twenty-four participants…

New tactile curriculum materials for teaching Earth and planetary science lessons on rotation=revolution, silhouettes of objects from different views, contour maps, impact craters, asteroids, and topographic features of Mars to 11 elementary and middle school students with sight impairments at a week-long residential summer camp are presented…

With more and more people attached to their computers, it's no wonder that publications are increasingly going online. Magazines are either supplementing their print content with online bonus information, such as extended features, photos, audio files, or videos, or looking to ditch the printing presses entirely to focus on all-electronic…

G. P. Bingham, R. C. Schmidt, and L. D. Rosenblum (1989) found that, by hefting objects of different sizes and weights, people could choose the optimal weight in each size for throwing to a maximum distance. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated this result. G. P. Bingham et al. hypothesized that hefting is a smart mechanism that allows objects…

The overarching goal of the present study was to trace the development of mirror self-recognition (MSR), as an index of toddlers' sense of themselves and others as autonomous intentional agents, in different sociocultural environments. A total of 276 toddlers participated in the present study. Toddlers were either 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, or 21 months…

Interpersonal touch has been little studied empirically as an indicator of parent- and peer-child intimacy. Undergraduate students (n = 390) were studied using a questionnaire survey regarding the frequencies of interpersonal touch by father, mother, same-sex peers, and opposite-sex peers during preschool ages, grades 1-3, grades 4-6, and grades…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness, generalizability, and the permanency of the instruction with the touch math technique. Direct instruction was used to the instruction of the basic summation skills of the students with mild intellectual disabilities. A multiple probe design across the subjects was used in this study. The…

In three experiments (N = 48 3- to 4-year olds; 100 3- to 5-year olds; 54 4-year-olds), children who could see or feel a target toy, recognized when they had sufficient information to answer "Which one is it?" and when they needed additional access. They were weaker at taking the informative modality of access when the choice was between seeing…

This study explored whether adding a haptic interface (that provides users with somatosensory information about virtual objects by force and tactile feedback) to a three-dimensional (3D) chemical model enhanced students' understanding of complex molecular interactions. Two modes of the model were compared in a between-groups pre- and posttest…

Bat/ball contact produces visual (the ball leaving the bat), auditory (the "crack" of the bat), and tactile (bat vibration) feedback about the success of the swing. We used a batting simulation to investigate how college baseball players use visual, tactile, and auditory feedback. In Experiment 1, swing accuracy (i.e., the lateral separation…