Background: Very little is known about the neuropsychological correlates of adaptive functioning in people with intellectual disabilities (ID). This study examined whether specific cognitive deficits and demographic variables predicted everyday functioning in adults with ID. Method: People with ID (n = 101; ages 19-41 years; mean education = 11…

Few studies have specifically investigated the cognitive correlates of employment for persons with mental retardation. To evaluate the relationship of cognitive and adaptive functioning to work status, 56 competitively employed and 55 unemployed individuals with mental retardation underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological and adaptive…

Ninety university undergraduate students were tested on a number of tasks assessing their recognition of possible and impossible figures, mental rotation, ideational fluency, and self-report artistic and creative characteristics. Scores on the Impossible Figures Task (IFT-14) and the Mental Rotation Test, and self-ratings on the Artistic…

Perceptual grouping by luminance similarity and by proximity was investigated in infants with Williams syndrome (WS) aged between 6 and 36 months (visit 1, N=29). WS infants who were still under 36 months old, 8 months later, repeated the testing procedure (visit 2, N=15). Performance was compared to typically developing (TD) infants aged from 2…

This study assessed the effects of multi-sensory training on the understanding of the alphabetic principle in kindergarten children from low socio-economic status families. Two interventions were compared, called HVAM (visual and haptic exploration of letters) and VAM (visual exploration of letters). The interventions were conducted by either…

Infants represent the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. They can recognize cross-modal equivalences between acts they see others perform and their own felt bodily movements. This recognition of self-other equivalences in action gives rise to interpreting others as having similar psychological states such as perceptions and…

Visual stress--a condition in which unpleasant visual symptoms are experienced when reading--has been reported to be more prevalent in dyslexic individuals but at the present time the relationship between dyslexia and visual stress remains controversial. ViSS, a computerized visual stress screener that incorporates reading-like visual search, has…

Studies have reported a right visual field (RVF) advantage for coherent motion detection by deaf and hearing signers but not non-signers. Yet two studies [Bosworth R. G., & Dobkins, K. R. (2002). Visual field asymmetries for motion processing in deaf and hearing signers. "Brain and Cognition," 49, 170-181; Samar, V. J., & Parasnis, I. (2005).…

Empirical data suggest that there is at most a very small sex difference in general mental ability, but men clearly perform better on visuospatial tasks while women clearly perform better on tests of verbal usage and perceptual speed. In this study, we integrated these overall findings with predictions based on the Verbal-Perceptual-Rotation (VPR)…

Those who focus on the study of visual information continue to search for effective ways to conceptualize that inquiry. However, many visual examples are better categorized as visual/verbal collaboration, complicating analysis. When analysis is based on the assumption that visual and verbal modalities perform in similar ways, important…

The perceived spatiotemporal continuity of objects depends on the way they appear and disappear as they move in the spatial layout. This study investigated whether infants' predictive tracking of a briefly occluded object is sensitive to the manner by which the object disappears and reappears. Five-, 7-, and 9-month-old infants were shown a ball…

It has been suggested that the differences observed for dyslexic readers compared to normal readers on tasks measuring visual sensitivity may simply be the result of differences between the two groups in general cognitive ability and/or attentional engagement. One common way to accommodate this proposal is to match normal and dyslexic readers on…

Del Giacco Art Therapy is a cognitive art therapy process that focuses on stimulating the mental sensory systems and working to stabilize the nervous system and create new neural connections in the brain. This system was created by Maureen Del Giacco, Phd. after recovering from her own traumatic brain injury and is based on extensive research of…

The test scores of spatial ability for women lag behind those of men in many spatial tests. On the Mental Rotations Test (MRT), a significant gender gap has existed for over 20 years and continues to exist. High spatial ability has been linked to efficiencies in typical computing tasks including Web and database searching, text editing, and…

Objective: The purpose of this study is to ascertain whether there are differences among groups of children based on their social perception skills in visual perception and fluid reasoning to assist in more effective intervention planning. Method: A total of 80 children were grouped on the basis of their performance on a social perception measure…