We evaluated a method for teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to respond to tactile stimulation of multiple body parts. Various objects (e.g., hairbrush) produced the sensations (e.g., prickly). In a multiple baseline design across participants, participants learned 9 sensation body part tacts and the evaluation concluded with tests of…

The research focuses on the diagnostics and stimulation of socially disadvantaged children of a preschool age, which is a crucial component of inclusive education. The aim of the research was to experimentally verify through input and output orientation diagnostics the effectiveness of the stimulation program for 5 to 6 year old socially…

Habituation is the simplest form of learning, but we know little about the transcriptional mechanisms that encode long-term habituation memory. A key obstacle is that habituation is relatively stimulus-specific and is thus encoded in small sets of neurons, providing poor signal/noise ratios for transcriptional analysis. To overcome this obstacle,…

Recent research has shown superior memory retrieval when participants make a series of horizontal saccadic eye movements between the memory encoding phase and the retrieval phase compared to participants who do not move their eyes or move their eyes vertically. It has been hypothesized that the rapidly alternating activation of the two hemispheres…

Vision of the body modulates somatosensation, even when entirely non-informative about stimulation. For example, seeing the body increases tactile spatial acuity, but reduces acute pain. While previous results demonstrate that vision of the body modulates somatosensory sensitivity, it is unknown whether vision also affects metric properties of…

Objective: To assess impact of tactile stimulation on neurobehavioral development of premature infants in Assiut City. Design: Quasi-experimental research design. Setting: The study was conducted in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Assiut University Children Hospital, Assiut General Hospital, Health Insurance Hospital (ElMabarah Hospital) and…

The aim of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to investigate brain activation associated with active and passive movements, and tactile stimulation in 17 children with right-sided unilateral cerebral palsy (CP), compared to 19 typically developing children (TD). The active movements consisted of repetitive opening and…

Understanding other people's feelings in social interactions depends on the ability to map onto our body the sensory experiences we observed on other people's bodies. It has been shown that the perception of tactile stimuli on the face is improved when concurrently viewing a face being touched. This Visual Remapping of Touch (VRT) is enhanced the…

The author tested the hypothesis that attachment to comfort objects is based on the sensory processing characteristics of the individual. Fifty-two undergraduate students with and without a childhood comfort object reported sensory responses and performed a tactile threshold task. Those with a comfort object described their object and rated their…

"Chills" (frisson manifested as goose bumps or shivers) have been used in an increasing number of studies as indicators of emotions in response to music (e.g., Craig, 2005; Guhn, Hamm, & Zentner, 2007; McCrae, 2007; Panksepp, 1995; Sloboda, 1991). In this study we present evidence that chills can be induced through aural, visual, tactile, and…

Animal studies demonstrate that maternal touch and contact regulate infant stress, and handling during periods of maternal deprivation attenuates the stress response. To measure the effects of touch on infant stress reactivity during simulated maternal deprivation, 53 dyads were tested in two paradigms: still-face (SF) and still-face with maternal…

Watching a rubber hand being stroked by a paintbrush while feeling identical stroking of one's own occluded hand can create a compelling illusion that the seen hand becomes part of one's own body. It has been suggested that this so-called rubber hand illusion (RHI) does not simply reflect a bottom-up multisensory integration process but that the…

Disrupted sensory processing, characterized by over- or underresponsiveness to environmental stimuli, has been reported in children with a variety of developmental disabilities. This study examined the effects of prenatal stress and moderate-level prenatal alcohol exposure on tactile sensitivity and its relationship to striatal dopamine system…

Background: For many years, and especially since Waynbaum and Wallon, psychology and psychopathology have dealt with cognitive perception, but have had little to do with the affective qualities of perception. Our aim was to study the influence of the sensory environment on people with autism. Method: Several experiments were carried out using…

This article analyzes the attraction of stimulation produced by a visuotactile sensory substitution device, which was designed to provide optical information to infants who are blind via a tactile modality. The device was first tested on sighted infants, to demonstrate that this type of stimulation on the abdomen is pleasant and rewarding in…