A food's visual features and testimony from others are important clues for children when making food choices. Children must integrate these two forms of information to make choices about food. The present study investigated children's food choices when these two clues are presented together. After confirming that children between the ages of…

Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

The aim of this study is to focus on the verbal stimuli of the Vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale -- Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV). To our knowledge, this is the first research to examine whether the abstractness/concreteness and the lexical category of the words in the WAIS-IV vocabulary subtest influence the ability to…

Insomnia is a common source of distress in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Two characteristics of ASD could be relevant to insomnia complaints by hampering the entrainment of a circadian sleep-wake rhythm. First, sensory hyper-reactivity could lead to bright light avoidance and thus affect photoperiodic input to the circadian system.…

The genetic diversity contained in a population can be used to engage the audience in an understanding of human genotypes and phenotypes. With a series of simple examples of well-documented sensory phenotypes related to the perception of colour, aromas or food preference, the diversity of the audience can be easily explored. The collecting of…

Previous studies have indicated that visual-auditory temporal acuity is reduced in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) in comparison to neurotypicals. In the present study we investigated temporal acuity for all possible bimodal pairings of visual, tactile and auditory information in adults with ASC (n = 18) and a matched control group…

Odor naming and recognition memory are poorer in children than in adults. This study explored whether such differences might result from poorer discriminative ability. Experiment 1 used an oddity test of discrimination with familiar odors on 6-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults. Six-year-olds were significantly poorer at discrimination relative…

The purpose of the study was to examine sensory modulation items on the Sensory Profile in individuals with autism as compared to community controls. The data for this study were collected as part of a cross-sectional study that examined sensory processing, using the Sensory Profile, in 103 individuals with autism and/or pervasive developmental…

Examines whether the type of pictorial stimulus affects the quality of an individual's written expression. Compared a pictorial stimulus to a conventional line drawing stimulus in its ability to evoke writing samples. Results of 50 respondents, ages 13 to 46, indicated that the type of prompt used in an assessment of written expression makes a…

In a series of four experiments, subjects used scales of loudness, pitch, and brightness to evaluate the meanings of a variety of synesthetic metaphors--expressions in which words or phrases describing experiences proper to one sense modality transfer their meaning to another modality. (Author/PN)