The present study examined the neural correlates of speech and hand gesture comprehension in a naturalistic context. Fifteen participants watched audiovisual segments of speech and gesture while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to the speech. Gesture influenced the ERPs to the speech. Specifically, there was a right-lateralized N400…

Social risk factors, executive neuropsychological functioning, and emotional numbing were examined as potential risk factors for violent sexual assaults by an adolescent male. The subject had been exposed to at least four previously identified social risk factors, including neglect, early separation from both parents, sexual abuse, and low…

This article reviews research on the spatial contiguity and temporal contiguity effects. Research on these instructional design effects has focussed on the instructional benefits for novices of reducing split attention between spatially or temporally disparate but related elements of information. Meta-analytic techniques were applied to 50…

Available for the first time in an English translation, the book reports the results of a series of studies undertaken in the early 1960s on the cognitive development of children with congenital blindness. Chapters one and two review the literaure on such topics as the concept of sensory compensation and the nature of tactual space and provide…

To provide converging support that the proper integration of analog and propositional representational systems is associated with spatial ability, the visual, auditory, and bimodal brain event-related potentials were recorded from 50 right-handed Caucasian males. Sensory interaction indices were derived for these subjects who had taken the Surface…

Six separate experiments were undertaken to test the hypothesis that poor readers in first, second, and third grade would have more difficulty with simple perceptual discriminations than would good readers in the same grades. Various tasks were used in the experiments, including discrimination of line orientations, checking letters in three-letter…

The techniques of meta-analysis were used to integrate statistically the findings from 31 studies on the relationship of auditory-visual integration and reading achievement. A total of 146 correlations were collected and aggregated across assessment procedures, reading skills, grade levels, and subject characteristics. (Author/SJL)

Described is the discovery that oscillations of electric potential at 40 hertz hold the key to how the brain assembles sense impressions into a single object. Potential implications from this research are discussed. (CW)

Adolescents with and without learning disabilities (14, 16, and 18 years old) were tested to determine whether they differed in auditory, visual, and/or multisensory social perception abilities. The adolescents with learning disabilities at all age levels were not as adept at understanding nonverbal social information regardless of whether it was…

Four- and seven-year olds were asked to make and explain predictions about their abilities to solve perceptual problems, perform the tasks, and explain their success or failure. Results indicated that young children have some clear-cut knowledge, and misconceptions, about their senses. Between four and seven years, children become increasingly…

Measures of sensory integration were applied to 32 learning-disabled and 35 nondisabled elementary students. Sensory integration was significantly related to school achievement both concurrently and predictively over a four-year period, even when controlling for intelligence. A particularly strong link between praxis and arithmetic achievement is…

Children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) may have poor audio-visual integration, possibly reflecting dysfunctional "mirror neuron" systems which have been hypothesised to be at the core of the condition. In the present study, a computer program, utilizing speech synthesizer software and a "virtual" head (Baldi), delivered speech stimuli for…

The objective of the present study was to identify the origin(s) of aging-related behavioral slowing in sensorimotor tasks. For this aim, event-related potentials (ERPs) were analyzed at 64 electrodes to evaluate the strength and timing of different stages of information processing in the brain. Electrophysiological induces of stimulus processing,…

In an attempt to address the issue of bimodal coordination of featural stimuli, the sensitivity of 3-month-old infants to the auditory and visual components of male and female stimulus configurations was examined. Measures were made of the infants' visual attention to a male or female face while they listened to a male voice, female voice, or to…

Psychometric test and the Uzgiris-Hunt Scale I (the Development of Visual Pursuit and the Permanence of Objects) were administered to mentally retarded preschoolers (N=105), school aged children (N=35), and adolescents (N=8), all functioning in the sensorimotor stage of development. Performances for each group are reported, and parent reactions…