N. O'connor

SPATIAL CODING IN NORMAL, AUTISTIC AND BLIND CHILDREN

The experiment tested whether tactile stimulation would be coded in terms of visual location, even when no visual cues were available. 10 blind, 10 blindfolded, and 10 sighted normal as well as 10 sighted autistic children, were tested, and the results did not indicate that space is represented solely in visual terms. The findings suggested that all groups used such information as was most readily available from the incoming sensory data rather than internally represented schemata of visually organized space.

Crossmodal transfer in normal, subnormal and autistic children

Abstract Crossmodal transfer between touch and vision and vision and touch was investigated in normal, severely subnormal and autistic children. No significant facilitation was found when visual tasks were preceded by tactual ones. Crossmodality transfer was, however, significant for all groups from vision to touch. As the groups differed in verbal ability but not in their capacity to transfer from one modality to another, a hypothesis attributing such crossmodal effects to verbal coding must be rejected. In view of the results it also seems that crossmodal transfer of this kind between vision and touch may not depend on intact cortical structure.