Cognitive and Behavioral Abnormalities of Pediatric Diseases, 2010
Ground-breaking progress in the field of neurodevelopmental disorders has allowed us far more ins... more Ground-breaking progress in the field of neurodevelopmental disorders has allowed us far more insight into blindness and visual impairment (VI). The field of cognitive neuroscience has now established itself solidly in the literature, combining the knowledge from cognitive psychology, clinical studies related to brain damage, and neuroscience to open the way to significant advances in understanding. In recent years, the optimism engendered from the adult studies has played a large part in providing the impetus for developmental studies and in particular developmental neuroscience (Johnson 2005; Tager-Flusberg 1999). It is from this developmental neuroscience perspective that we can begin to understand the cognitive and behavioral manifestations associated with blindness and VI; albeit with the proviso that children with VI present particularly heterogeneous developmental patterns when compared to typically developing children (Fraiberg 1971). In considering the effects of blindness ...
The study investigated mentalistic and descriptive discourse between school-aged children with vi... more The study investigated mentalistic and descriptive discourse between school-aged children with visual impairment (VI) from birth, age 6-12 years, and their sighted mothers during joint book narrative (n=12), and in comparison to a group of sighted children of comparable age and verbal ability, and their mothers (n=14). The mothers of children with VI referred to the story characters' mental states and used descriptive elaborations to a greater extent than did the mothers of sighted children. The more mentalistic language the mothers of children with VI produced, the more mentalistic language was spoken by their children, although this was not independent of mothers' verbosity. The frequency of maternal elaborations, including their mentalistic language, was related the VI child's verbal cognition and socio-communicative competence. The findings offer an insight into nature and value of verbal scaffolding provided by mothers to their children with VI, shedding light on a ...
Dr Neil O'Connor, was a distinguished scientist and former Director of the Medical Research C... more Dr Neil O'Connor, was a distinguished scientist and former Director of the Medical Research Council's Developmental Psychology Unit. He died after being knocked down by a bicycle on 1st October 1997. He was 80 years old and I had known him for 18 of them, and this brief article is just to remind us of the unique contribution that he made to our understanding of the relationship between musical talent and intelligence.
SynopsisSavant artists represent a conundrum to our understanding of the nature of high level spe... more SynopsisSavant artists represent a conundrum to our understanding of the nature of high level specific talents as well as to the concept of general intellectual impairment. In the present paper, we are particularly concerned with the relationship between general perceptual-motor functions in relation to drawing aptitude. Drawing is by definition a perceptual-motor operation, yet mental handicap tends to be associated with some degree of impairment in this area. The following study seeks to isolate such aspects of performance on general perceptual-motor skills that might be associated with drawing ability, and may thus be regarded as building blocks underlying the manifestation of graphic talent. The results are discussed in terms of the relationships between graphic talent, non-verbal intelligence and visual-motor functions.
For wayfinding at museums, galleries, and heritage sites, the majority of people who are blind or... more For wayfinding at museums, galleries, and heritage sites, the majority of people who are blind or partially sighted favour verbal directions over tactile maps. Those who provide such directions are usually fully sighted. Can we assume that details considered important by those with vision are equally helpful to those without? This article presents a study comparing descriptions of familiar routes recalled by fully sighted, partially sighted, and blind participants, highlighting the differences in navigation strategies. All participants cited landmarks, but those with impaired vision also detailed significantly more objects, or ‘milestones’, en route. In the absence of such milestones, they relied on metrics that were often environmental or body-based. Distances were precisely specified, rather than ‘vague’. Landmarks and milestones were accessed multimodally by blind and partially sighted participants, or a combination of landmarks and milestones were sought for corroboration. In co...
Background The study grew out of a music workshop held during the FOCUS Families UK Conference (2... more Background The study grew out of a music workshop held during the FOCUS Families UK Conference (2003). A number of parents reported that their children had what seemed to be unusually high levels of musical interest or ability, and they asked whether these characteristics may be ...
The oral reading errors made by nine partially sighted children, aged five years eight months to ... more The oral reading errors made by nine partially sighted children, aged five years eight months to eight years seven months, over a seven-month period during 1986 were analysed and found to resemble those of younger fully sighted children. The relevance of this study for teachers of partially sighted children in mainstream schools is suggested.
A high incidence of absolute pitch has been reported among individuals with visual impairment (VI... more A high incidence of absolute pitch has been reported among individuals with visual impairment (VI), while recent behavioral and imaging evidence has indicated that enhanced abilities in the auditory domain result from the cross-modal takeover of the visually deafferented occipital areas. In this study, we tested the identification of musical pitch associated with verbal labels in children with congenital VI, together with a group of fully sighted children who acted as a comparison group, using a novel online assessment tool. The results indicated superior naming of musical pitch in the group with VI compared with the control group. Moreover, a bimodal distribution was found in the VI group in terms of the number of accurate pitch identifications. These preliminary findings suggest that enhanced pitch-naming ability in individuals with severe VI may be due to early differences in neural development brought about by loss of sight.
Autobiographical memory difficulties have been widely reported in adults with autism spectrum dis... more Autobiographical memory difficulties have been widely reported in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aim of the current study was to explore the potential correlates of autobiographical memory performance (including depressed mood, rumination, working memory and theory of mind) in adults with ASD, relative to a group of typical adults matched for age, gender and IQ. Results demonstrated that the adults with ASD reported higher levels of depressed mood and rumination than the typical adults, and also received lower scores on measures of theory of mind and working memory. Correlational analysis suggested that theory of mind and working memory were associated with autobiographical memory performance in the adults with ASD, but no significant relationships were observed between autobiographical memory, depressed mood and rumination in this group. To explore these patterns further, two cases of adults with a dual diagnosis of ASD and depression are discussed. These participa...
The purpose of this investigation was to consider whether the input modality and orthographic dif... more The purpose of this investigation was to consider whether the input modality and orthographic differences in braille reading produce different word recognition strategies for blind as compared with sighted persons. Blind children, blind adults, and sighted children were compared as to the extent to which they showed a pseudohomophone effect, which is held to reflect phonological coding. While in the sighted individuals there was strong evidence for such an effect, this was not so with the blind persons. The results were interpreted to indicate a differential allocation of attention to levels of word processing between the groups of readers.
This article reports three experiments that tested the ability of 11 6–10-year-old children with ... more This article reports three experiments that tested the ability of 11 6–10-year-old children with low vision to recall black-and-white line drawings. Unlike the 22 fully sighted children who were also tested, the children with low vision recalled best when they were left to study the pictures without verbal intervention. Compared with the fully sighted children, the children with low vision named significantly fewer of the remembered pictures correctly.
Eight congenitally blind children, individually matched with eight sighted children, were tested ... more Eight congenitally blind children, individually matched with eight sighted children, were tested for their ability to identify vocal expressions of emotion and the sounds of a range of non-emotional objects. They had specific difficulty recognizing emotions according to vocal qualities.
Cognitive and Behavioral Abnormalities of Pediatric Diseases, 2010
Ground-breaking progress in the field of neurodevelopmental disorders has allowed us far more ins... more Ground-breaking progress in the field of neurodevelopmental disorders has allowed us far more insight into blindness and visual impairment (VI). The field of cognitive neuroscience has now established itself solidly in the literature, combining the knowledge from cognitive psychology, clinical studies related to brain damage, and neuroscience to open the way to significant advances in understanding. In recent years, the optimism engendered from the adult studies has played a large part in providing the impetus for developmental studies and in particular developmental neuroscience (Johnson 2005; Tager-Flusberg 1999). It is from this developmental neuroscience perspective that we can begin to understand the cognitive and behavioral manifestations associated with blindness and VI; albeit with the proviso that children with VI present particularly heterogeneous developmental patterns when compared to typically developing children (Fraiberg 1971). In considering the effects of blindness ...
The study investigated mentalistic and descriptive discourse between school-aged children with vi... more The study investigated mentalistic and descriptive discourse between school-aged children with visual impairment (VI) from birth, age 6-12 years, and their sighted mothers during joint book narrative (n=12), and in comparison to a group of sighted children of comparable age and verbal ability, and their mothers (n=14). The mothers of children with VI referred to the story characters' mental states and used descriptive elaborations to a greater extent than did the mothers of sighted children. The more mentalistic language the mothers of children with VI produced, the more mentalistic language was spoken by their children, although this was not independent of mothers' verbosity. The frequency of maternal elaborations, including their mentalistic language, was related the VI child's verbal cognition and socio-communicative competence. The findings offer an insight into nature and value of verbal scaffolding provided by mothers to their children with VI, shedding light on a ...
Dr Neil O'Connor, was a distinguished scientist and former Director of the Medical Research C... more Dr Neil O'Connor, was a distinguished scientist and former Director of the Medical Research Council's Developmental Psychology Unit. He died after being knocked down by a bicycle on 1st October 1997. He was 80 years old and I had known him for 18 of them, and this brief article is just to remind us of the unique contribution that he made to our understanding of the relationship between musical talent and intelligence.
SynopsisSavant artists represent a conundrum to our understanding of the nature of high level spe... more SynopsisSavant artists represent a conundrum to our understanding of the nature of high level specific talents as well as to the concept of general intellectual impairment. In the present paper, we are particularly concerned with the relationship between general perceptual-motor functions in relation to drawing aptitude. Drawing is by definition a perceptual-motor operation, yet mental handicap tends to be associated with some degree of impairment in this area. The following study seeks to isolate such aspects of performance on general perceptual-motor skills that might be associated with drawing ability, and may thus be regarded as building blocks underlying the manifestation of graphic talent. The results are discussed in terms of the relationships between graphic talent, non-verbal intelligence and visual-motor functions.
For wayfinding at museums, galleries, and heritage sites, the majority of people who are blind or... more For wayfinding at museums, galleries, and heritage sites, the majority of people who are blind or partially sighted favour verbal directions over tactile maps. Those who provide such directions are usually fully sighted. Can we assume that details considered important by those with vision are equally helpful to those without? This article presents a study comparing descriptions of familiar routes recalled by fully sighted, partially sighted, and blind participants, highlighting the differences in navigation strategies. All participants cited landmarks, but those with impaired vision also detailed significantly more objects, or ‘milestones’, en route. In the absence of such milestones, they relied on metrics that were often environmental or body-based. Distances were precisely specified, rather than ‘vague’. Landmarks and milestones were accessed multimodally by blind and partially sighted participants, or a combination of landmarks and milestones were sought for corroboration. In co...
Background The study grew out of a music workshop held during the FOCUS Families UK Conference (2... more Background The study grew out of a music workshop held during the FOCUS Families UK Conference (2003). A number of parents reported that their children had what seemed to be unusually high levels of musical interest or ability, and they asked whether these characteristics may be ...
The oral reading errors made by nine partially sighted children, aged five years eight months to ... more The oral reading errors made by nine partially sighted children, aged five years eight months to eight years seven months, over a seven-month period during 1986 were analysed and found to resemble those of younger fully sighted children. The relevance of this study for teachers of partially sighted children in mainstream schools is suggested.
A high incidence of absolute pitch has been reported among individuals with visual impairment (VI... more A high incidence of absolute pitch has been reported among individuals with visual impairment (VI), while recent behavioral and imaging evidence has indicated that enhanced abilities in the auditory domain result from the cross-modal takeover of the visually deafferented occipital areas. In this study, we tested the identification of musical pitch associated with verbal labels in children with congenital VI, together with a group of fully sighted children who acted as a comparison group, using a novel online assessment tool. The results indicated superior naming of musical pitch in the group with VI compared with the control group. Moreover, a bimodal distribution was found in the VI group in terms of the number of accurate pitch identifications. These preliminary findings suggest that enhanced pitch-naming ability in individuals with severe VI may be due to early differences in neural development brought about by loss of sight.
Autobiographical memory difficulties have been widely reported in adults with autism spectrum dis... more Autobiographical memory difficulties have been widely reported in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aim of the current study was to explore the potential correlates of autobiographical memory performance (including depressed mood, rumination, working memory and theory of mind) in adults with ASD, relative to a group of typical adults matched for age, gender and IQ. Results demonstrated that the adults with ASD reported higher levels of depressed mood and rumination than the typical adults, and also received lower scores on measures of theory of mind and working memory. Correlational analysis suggested that theory of mind and working memory were associated with autobiographical memory performance in the adults with ASD, but no significant relationships were observed between autobiographical memory, depressed mood and rumination in this group. To explore these patterns further, two cases of adults with a dual diagnosis of ASD and depression are discussed. These participa...
The purpose of this investigation was to consider whether the input modality and orthographic dif... more The purpose of this investigation was to consider whether the input modality and orthographic differences in braille reading produce different word recognition strategies for blind as compared with sighted persons. Blind children, blind adults, and sighted children were compared as to the extent to which they showed a pseudohomophone effect, which is held to reflect phonological coding. While in the sighted individuals there was strong evidence for such an effect, this was not so with the blind persons. The results were interpreted to indicate a differential allocation of attention to levels of word processing between the groups of readers.
This article reports three experiments that tested the ability of 11 6–10-year-old children with ... more This article reports three experiments that tested the ability of 11 6–10-year-old children with low vision to recall black-and-white line drawings. Unlike the 22 fully sighted children who were also tested, the children with low vision recalled best when they were left to study the pictures without verbal intervention. Compared with the fully sighted children, the children with low vision named significantly fewer of the remembered pictures correctly.
Eight congenitally blind children, individually matched with eight sighted children, were tested ... more Eight congenitally blind children, individually matched with eight sighted children, were tested for their ability to identify vocal expressions of emotion and the sounds of a range of non-emotional objects. They had specific difficulty recognizing emotions according to vocal qualities.
Ved Varma: The Inner Life of Children with Special Needs. Whurr., 1996
Children who are visually impaired seem to suffer the greatest trauma in the early years of life ... more Children who are visually impaired seem to suffer the greatest trauma in the early years of life and it is at this time that it is hardest of all to get a window on their feelings, thoughts and inner world. This article seeks to follow through this observation with many examples from children known to the authors.
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This article seeks to follow through this observation with many examples from children known to the authors.