This article describes how the quilts fashioned by Joanne Marian of Boswell have helped children with exceptional needs. Marian's quilts, which are freely given, are created using donated scraps of texture-rich fabrics, patterns, and embellishments to heighten the intensity of tactile detail for exceptional children who may be visually impaired or…

All children have their own unique ways of interacting with their environments, connecting with people around them, and learning about their world. Babies take in information from their senses and use this information to respond to people and events. Children's daily experiences facilitate integration of their senses. These early sensory…

Recent research indicates that by 4.5 months, infants use shape and size information as the basis for individuating objects but that it is not until 11.5 months that they use color information for this purpose. The present experiments investigated the extent to which infants' sensitivity to color information could be increased through select…

Using a single-subject alternating treatments reversal design, the effects of three conditions, tactile stimulation, auditory stimulation, and choice of the two, were compared on the math story problem solving of elementary students with attention problems. Students attempted and solved slightly more problems and engaged in fewer off-task…

The study was undertaken to evaluate the nature of sensory dysfunction in persons with autism. The cross-sectional study examined auditory, visual, oral, and touch sensory processing, as measured by the Sensory Profile, in 104 persons with a diagnosis of autism, 3-56 years of age, gender- and age-matched to community controls. Persons with autism…

Two experiments were conducted to (1) replicate the findings of habituation of behavioral responding to a tactile stimulus assuring state control and (2) demonstrate dishabituation either by reinstatement of responding to the original, habituated stimulus or to novel stimuli either within or between modalities. Subjects were newborn Caucasian…

Surveys research on the differences between haptic and visual learners and describes a haptic testing program to help industrial arts teachers work with haptic students. (SK)

In three experiments, sighted college students tried to learn the names of the first 10 symbols of the braille alphabet. In Experiments 1 and 2, visual examination of the symbols enhanced learning. In Experiment 3, similar results were obtained when standard size braille symbols were used during the study trials. (Author)

All Ss' accuracy decreased with increasing task difficulty. Accuracy of nonretarded Ss did not differ as a function of visual status. Blind retarded Ss were more accurate than were sighted retarded Ss. (Author)

A cell-by-cell analysis of finger movements of 16 blind adolescent braille readers was conducted to separate, catalog, and measure the components of scanning movements across braille cells as a function of reading proficiency. Results confirmed the superiority of bimanual reading and suggested that the two hands may perform different functions.…

Different materials that are used in manufacturing long cane shafts were assessed for their ability to transmit vibration and their sensitivity to tactile information, flexibility, and durability. It was found that the less flexible a cane shaft is, the better it transmits vibrations that are useful for discriminating surface textures and that…

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…

As part of an ongoing evaluation of the Tactile Vocoder, a device that allows the acoustic waveform to be felt as a vibrational pattern on the skin, two prelingually profoundly deaf teenagers reached criterion on a 50-word vocabulary (live voice, single speaker) after 28.5 and 24.0 hours of training. (Author/DB)

The linguistic abilities of three adult deaf-blind subjects who acquired language through the Tadoma method (involves monitoring a speaker's articulatory motions by placing a hand on his face) were examined. The subjects' English language abilities were excellent, suggesting that the tactile sense is adequate in highly trained Tadoma users in…