Young children do science exploration and observation every day in their play. They spontaneously engage in parts of the scientific inquiry process--wondering, asking a question, planning how to answer the question, documenting their work, thinking about what happened, and sharing their results with others. Conducting an entire experiment is…

Significant improvements in scanning and processing times, attention deployment strategies, and response accuracy on haptic and visual discrimination tasks coupled with increases in reflectivity demonstrate the effectiveness, durability, and generalizability of haptic training with 12 communications disordered/neurologically impaired elementary…

Superior performance by adventitiously blind Ss relative to congenitally blind Ss appeared on tasks where the stimuli were complex, familiar and/or apprehenced with arm's length of the body, but not on tasks where the stimuli were relatively simple, novel, and/or apprehenced only through locomotion. (Author/MC)

A teacher describes ways in which learning disabled students can learn through tactile-kinesthetic approaches devised by the teacher. Examples are given of multiplication instruction by counting on fingers, and grammar and long division instruction through movement. (CL)

Describes a museum exhibit of Japanese art designed to enhance tactual awareness. Blind and sighted visitors cooperated in sharing their hands-on perceptions of objects. Display pieces, chosen for functionality and design interest, included ceramics, textiles, folk art, lacquer work, musical instruments, and household objects. (AM)

Witelson found that boys but not girls showed right-hemisphere specialization for tactile-spatial processing as early as six years. Witelson's task was administered to 46 normal four- and five-year olds. Both sexes showed right-hemisphere specialization. No sex differences appeared either in specialization or in overall performance. (Author/SJL)

Forty 10-month-old infants were given two minutes to explore tactually an object in a totally darkened room. Subsequently, during a two-minute test trial in the dark, 10 infants were given the same object and 10 were given a novel shape. Novel shapes were manipulated significantly longer than familiar forms. (RH)

Aesthetic sensitivity is present in children to varying degrees, but creativity emerges and develops with intelligent assessment of aesthetic experiences. (JD)

Discusses haptic learning, problems related to teaching students with that learning style, and methods that have been used to mediate these problems. (JOW)

In 2 experiments, mothers, between 5 and 81 hours after giving birth, stroked the hand of 3 infants and then guessed which infant was their own. Results showed that the majority of mothers who had been with their infant for an hour or more since childbirth were successful at the task. (BC)

This article presents a model for the motion of a long-cane executing the touch technique and presents formulas for the projected length of a cane adequate to protect an individual with blindness against wall-type and pole-type hazards. The paper concludes that the long-cane should reach from the floor to the user's armpit. (JDD)

Explores children's conceptions of burning through observation and discussion of a number of challenging phenomenon. Finds that children's conceptions are both specific and contextually based. (Author/CCM)

Research has suggested that perception and action are independent (see M. A. Goodale & A. Haffenden, 1998). The authors used the Ebbinghaus illusion to test this hypothesis in 2 experiments. Verbal reports of perceived size were compared with maximum grip aperture during grasping (Experiment 1) and manual reports of perceived size (Experiment 2).…

This study of the haptic exploratory strategies used by nine children with visual impairments and additional disabilities when interacting with portable and freely manipulable objects found that a broader approach to assessment and analysis is required than is used with typically developing children. An "adaptive-tasks" approach is proposed as a…

In tactile learning, sucrose is the unconditioned stimulus and reward, which is usually applied to the antenna to elicit proboscis extension and which the bee can drink when it is subsequently applied to the extended proboscis. The conditioned stimulus is a tactile object that the bee can scan with its antennae. In this paper we describe the…