Courses in a wide variety of disciplines emphasize that what we think important, and are therefore likely to remember, is not the result of the objective situation but rather the result of our individual biases and interpretations. This article presents a classroom exercise that aids students in grasping the interpretive nature of historical…

Recent findings suggest that children with autism may be impaired in the perception of biological motion from moving point-light displays. Some children with autism also have abnormally high motion coherence thresholds. In the current study we tested a group of children with autism and a group of typically developing children aged 5 to 12 years of…

Background: Several researchers have found evidence for impaired global processing in the dorsal visual stream in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). However, support for a similar pattern of visual processing in the ventral visual stream is less consistent. Critical to resolving the inconsistency is the assessment of local and…

The abilities to identify threat and learn about affect in facial photographs were compared between a non-autistic university student group (NUS), a matched Asperger's group (MAS) on the Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM), and an unmatched Asperger's group (UAS) who scored lower on the SPM. Participants were given pairs of faces and asked which…

Patients with homonymous visual field defects experience disabling functional impairments as a consequence of their visual loss. Compensatory visual exploration training aims to improve the searching skills of these patients in order to help them to cope more effectively. However, until now the efficacy of this training has not been compared to…

We investigated the influences of two different suprapostural visual tasks, visual searching and visual inspection, on the postural sway of children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Sixteen ASD children (age=8.75 [plus or minus] 1.34 years; height=130.34 [plus or minus] 11.03 cm) were recruited from a local support group.…

Previous studies of visually symptomatic dyslexics have found that their contrast thresholds for pattern discrimination are the same as non-dyslexics. However, when noise is added to the stimuli, contrast thresholds rise markedly in dyslexics compared with non-dyslexics. This result could be due to impaired noise exclusion in dyslexics. Some…

Working memory, inhibition and naming speed was assessed in 22 children with mathematical learning disorders (MD), 17 children with a reading learning disorder (RD), and 45 children without any learning problems between 8 and 12 years old. All subjects with learning disorders performed poorly on working memory tasks, providing evidence that they…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of an intensive psychosocial intervention on the executive functioning (EF) in children with ADHD. The treatment was carried out in a coordinated manner over a period of 10 weeks with 27 children with ADHD aged 7 to 10, their parents, and their teachers. A battery of neuropsychological tasks was…

The purpose of this study was to compare three groups: JROTC students, student athletes, and other students, to determine if there were differences in academic achievement. Gaining an understanding of the necessary skills required to become academically successful and make healthy life choices, could provide educators working within an urban…

Spatial ability is important to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) success, but spatial talents are rarely developed in schools. Likewise, the gifted may become STEM innovators, but they are rarely provided with pedagogy appropriate to develop their abilities in schools. A stratified random sample of volunteer participants (n = 75)…

It is well known that perceptual and conceptual fluency can influence episodic memory judgments. Here, the authors asked whether fluency arising from the motor system also impacts recognition memory. Past research has shown that the perception of letters automatically activates motor programs of typing actions in skilled typists. In this study,…

The study sought to provide norms for a simple test of visual perception of verticality (subjective visual vertical). The study was designed as a cohort study with a balanced design. The setting was the Rehabilitation Department of a University Hospital. Twenty-two healthy adults, of 23-58 years, 11 men (three left handed) and 11 women (three left…

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) rely on knowledge of tongue placement to assess and provide intervention. A total of 175 SLPs who worked with children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) drew coronal diagrams of tongue/palate contact for 24 English consonants. Comparisons were made between their responses and typical English-speaking adults'…

The speech produced by human vocal tract is a complex acoustic signal, with diverse applications in phonetics, speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, speaker identification, communication aids, speech pathology, speech perception, machine translation, hearing research, rehabilitation and assessment of communication disorders and many…