Although hearing often declines with age, prior research has shown that older adults may benefit from multisensory input to a greater extent when compared to younger adults, a concept known as inverse effectiveness. While there is behavioral evidence in support of this phenomenon, less is known about its neural basis. The present functional MRI…

The integrated use of spatial and temporal information seems to support the separation of two sensory streams. The present study tested whether this facilitation depends on the encoding of sensory stimuli in externally anchored spatial coordinate systems. Fifty-nine children between 5 and 12 years as well as 12 young adults performed a crossmodal…

We live in a multisensory world and one of the challenges the brain is faced with is deciding what information belongs together. Our ability to make assumptions about the relatedness of multisensory stimuli is partly based on their temporal and spatial relationships. Stimuli that are proximal in time and space are likely to be bound together by…

The ability to learn temporal patterns in sequenced actions was investigated in elementary-school age children. Temporal learning depends upon a process of integrating timing patterns with action sequences. Children ages 6-13 and young adults performed a serial response time task in which a response and a timing sequence were presented repeatedly…

Recent educational studies have found evidence that measures of fine motor skills are predictive of educational outcomes. However, the precise nature of fine motor skills has received little attention in these studies. With evidence mounting that fine motor skills are an important indicator of school readiness, investigating the nature of this…

The papers included here are based on a 1971 symposium held at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association in San Francisco. The first three papers report the results of research carried out over the last few years at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning. Levin's paper focuses on the effectiveness of…

Paper is based on a Master's Thesis submitted by the senior author to the Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, 1967. (IR)

Right-hemispheric specialization for tactual processing was investigated in right-handed preschool children. Cross-modal transfer from touch to vision was assessed while children palpated shapes with hand while music was simultaneously played to ear. Left-hand advantage and lateralized nature of interference among older children supports…

Verbal-to-spatial associations in working memory may index a core capacity for abstract information limited in the amount concurrently retained. However, what look like associative, abstract representations could instead reflect verbal and spatial codes held separately and then used in parallel. We investigated this issue in two experiments on…

This paper presents a study using a neo-Piagetian theory to analyze the micro-structure underlying Piaget's "control of variables" scheme. Data are presented which support the conclusion that young children are capable of acquiring and utilizing this scheme before they acquire Conservation of Weight, that is, providing (1) that the…