Visual learning, the capacity to construe meaning from visual images and to create meaningful visual forms, distills complex information and presents information directly. It plays an important role in development of the ability to abstract and decode. (SK)

Reports on a multisensory intervention that combined art, music, and movement within a long-term care setting for Alzheimer's patients. Details the benefits derived by some of the participants who attended the sessions regularly. Many were able to retrieve memories, enjoy socialization, and have the opportunity for affective expression. (RJM)

This article discusses issues related to auditory integration training (AIT), a developing treatment for children with auditory disorders. It presents preliminary data indicating that word recognition scores in the presence of competing noise improves for children with a variety of disorders who have been treated with AIT. (Author/DB)

First this article reviews the research pertaining to treatment efficacy of sensory integration therapy for children with language-learning disorders and academic difficulties. Second, it considers the perspectives from which various researchers and clinicians view language disorders and third, it discusses parameters for evaluating efficacy…

For individuals with synaesthesia, stimuli in one sensory modality elicit anomalous experiences in another modality. For example, the sound of a particular piano note may be "seen" as a unique colour, or the taste of a familiar food may be "felt" as a distinct bodily sensation. We report a study of 192 adult synaesthetes, in…

An increasing number of students diagnosed with difficulties such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Asperger?s syndrome are being seen in schools. Sensory integration difficulties may be part of the symptomatology of these disorders. These difficulties may result in difficulties with both classroom behaviors and academic performance.…

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS), either before age two (early) or later at school (late), were presented with pseudowords with and without CS. The main goal was to establish the way in which lipreading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts, similar to audiovisual integration in speech perception, when participants are presented with…

We report a 53-year-old patient (AWF) who has an acquired deficit of audiovisual speech integration, characterized by a perceived temporal mismatch between speech sounds and the sight of moving lips. AWF was less accurate on an auditory digit span task with vision of a speaker's face as compared to a condition in which no visual information from…

In many theories of cognition, researchers propose that working memory and perception operate interactively. For example, in previous studies researchers have suggested that sensory inputs matching the contents of working memory will have an automatic advantage in the competition for processing resources. The authors tested this hypothesis by…

All children have their own unique ways of interacting with their environments, connecting with people around them, and learning about their world. Babies take in information from their senses and use this information to respond to people and events. Children's daily experiences facilitate integration of their senses. These early sensory…

Recent research indicates that by 4.5 months, infants use shape and size information as the basis for individuating objects but that it is not until 11.5 months that they use color information for this purpose. The present experiments investigated the extent to which infants' sensitivity to color information could be increased through select…

"Child Care Health Connections" is a bimonthly newsletter published by the California Childcare Health Program (CCHP), a community-based program of the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing, Department of Family Health Care Nursing. The goals of the newsletter are to promote and support a healthy and safe environment…

Failure to attain handwriting competency during the school-age years often has far-reaching negative effects on both academic success and self-esteem. This complex occupational task has many underlying component skills that may interfere with handwriting performance. Fine motor control, bilateral and visual-motor integration, motor planning,…

In this article, we examine the extent to which children with autism and children with learning difficulties can be discriminated from their responses to different patterns of sensory stimuli. Using an adapted version of the Short Sensory Profile (SSP), sensory processing was compared in 34 children with autism to 33 children with typical…

This article presents a sensory description of the sounds of language which differs from the traditional acoustic or articulatory description. The main idea is that sounds differ according to auditory and extra-auditory factors. (Text is in French.) (AM)