To examine how individuals with visual impairments understand space and the way they develop cognitive maps, we studied the differences in cognitive maps resulting from different methods and tools for spatial coding in large geographical spaces. We examined the ability of 21 blind individuals to create cognitive maps of routes in unfamiliar areas…

It has been suggested that the sensory symptoms which affect many people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) may be related to alterations in multisensory processing. Typically, the likelihood of interactions between the senses increases when information is temporally and spatially coincident. We explored visual-tactile interactions in adults…

The relations between reading, auditory, speech, phonological and tactile spatial processing are investigated in a Dutch speaking sample of blind braille readers as compared to sighted print readers. Performance is assessed in blind and sighted children and adults. Regarding phonological ability, braille readers perform equally well compared to…

Negative priming (NP) refers to the finding that people's responses to probe targets previously presented as prime distractors are usually slower than to unrepeated stimuli. Intriguingly, the effect sizes of tactile NP were much larger than the effect sizes for visual NP. We analyzed whether the large tactile NP effect is just a side effect of the…

Adults vary their haptic exploratory behavior reliably with variation both in the sensory input and in the task goals. Little is known about the development of these connections between perceptual goals and exploratory behaviors. A total of 36 children ages 3, 4, and 5 years and 20 adults completed a haptic intramodal match-to-sample task.…

Social interactions within virtual communities are often described solely as being online experiences. Such descriptions are limited, for they fail to reference life external to the screen. The terms "virtual" and "real" have a negative connotation for many people and can even be interpreted to mean that something is "false" or "inauthentic."…

Investigates the development of lateralization of cerebral function for touch and assesses whether deaf children's lateralization pattern for this sensory system shows any deviations from that of normal children. Three groups of right-handed subjects voluntarily participated in a unimodal haptic matching task: hearing adults, hearing children, and…

Describes two experiments that examined whether the amplitude of the human eyeblink by a mild tap between the eyebrows can be increased if a brief tone is presented simultaneously with the tap and how these effects change from newborn infants to adults. (HOD)

The recognition performance for segmental stimuli was compared when presented through a single-channel tactile device and through a 24-channel vocoder. Both consonant and vowel stimuli were tested under visual only, tactile only, and visual/tactile conditions. Results indicated no significant performance differences for the 12 artificially…