This article describes the use of touch as a strategy to teach children with multiple handicaps. Touch cues help children to anticipate events and to interpret information from the environment. Caregivers should first observe the child's existing repertoire of movements, and then create touch cues that build upon the child's preferred…

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…

Figures that undergo an implied rotation are remembered as being slightly beyond their final position, a phenomenon called representational momentum. Eight experiments explored the questions of what gets transformed and what types of transformations induce such representational distortions. (GDC)

Seventy-two sighted college students who studied the braille or Fishburne alphabet for eight minutes were tested for recall. More Fishburne than braille items were recalled, independent of item arrangement. Results suggest that visually impaired persons might use the Fishburne system for labelling personal objects or when braille learning is too…

In a comparison of the performance of active and passive mechanically yoked subjects who learned their way through a tactile maze, it was shown that active subjects made more errors and took a greater number of trials to reach criterion than did passive subjects. (Author)

The Haptic Visual Discrimination Test of tactual-visual information processing was administered to 39 first-graders, along with standard intelligence, academic potential, and spatial integration tests. Results revealed consistently significant associations between the importance of parieto-occipital areas for organizing sensory data as well as for…

In two related experiments on recognition--on touch and audition--accuracy rates were obtained from 14 congenitally blind adults and compared with those for normally sighted Ss. (Author/SBH)

Twenty-five one-year-olds were administered two tasks (each of which consisted of a familiarization stage followed by a recognition stage) in order to determine whether infants can recognize the shapes of objects by touch alone. (CM)

Forty-two normal children aged 8 to 12 years identified tactile stimuli in a visual display. The results indicated the left-hand (right hemisphere) specialization for tactile-spatial ability develops with increasing age in middle childhood. (Author)

Results indicated that four-year-old children who viewed a television program did not demonstrate greater haptic ability to recognize and categorize shapes than did children not exposed to the program. Results also suggested that children's TV does not facilitate concrete operational thinking in shape recognition for preschoolers. (Author/DB)

Examined quantitative developmental changes in the use of specific haptic exploratory strategies and the relationship between these changes and the developmental increases in matching accuracy. Subjects were kindergarten children, second and fourth graders, and college students. (JMB)

Investigated the relative effects of developmental level and domain-specific knowledge on 4- to 9-year-olds' ability to identify and make similarity decisions about objects based on haptic or tactile information. Found that older children explored models more exhaustively, found more differentiating features, and made fewer errors than younger…

The study examined the ability of five deaf-blind subjects to receive fingerspelled materials through the tactual sense, and of six deaf subjects to receive fingerspelling through the visual sense. Results found highly accurate tactual reception at normal rates and suggested that rates for visual reception are limited by the rate of manual…

Among 294 children of three to eight years, tactual oddity learning increased gradually with age. The finding of bidirectional cross-modal transfer of oddity learning supported the suggestion that such transfer occurs when training and transfer oddity tasks share a common vehicle dimension. Results are considered consistent with the view that…

The developmental change from global toward dimensional classifications, usually observed in vision, was investigated in haptics with stimuli varying according to their size and roughness. Results indicated that, although more overall similarity classifications were observed in children than in adults, this kind of classification was never…