In order to better understand the role of the vestibular system in postural adjustments on unstable surfaces, we analyzed the effects of galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) on the pattern of muscle activity and joint displacements (ankle knee and hip) of eight intellectually normal participants (control group--CG) and eight control group…

What is it like to have a body? The present study takes a psychometric approach to this question. We collected structured introspective reports of the rubber hand illusion, to systematically investigate the structure of bodily self-consciousness. Participants observed a rubber hand that was stroked either synchronously or asynchronously with their…

The environment at indoor inflatable playgrounds, featuring giant bounce houses and slides, can become an ideal place for children with autism to receive helpful sensations. This is the reasoning behind Sensory Nights hosted by the Autism Society of America and Pump It Up, a national franchise of giant, indoor inflatable playgrounds. The private…

The goal of this work is to analyze postural control in Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) participants in time and frequency domain. This study considered a pathological group composed by 22 EDS participants performing a postural test consisting in maintaining standing position over a force platform for 30 s in two conditions: open eyes (OE) and closed…

This exploratory study aimed to investigate elements involved in decision making in team handball live situations and to provide coaches and educators with teaching recommendations. The study was positioned within the framework of the situated-action paradigm of which two aspects were of particular interest for this project: (a) the relationship…

This article describes a parallel and distributed processing model (PDPM) of joint attention, self-referenced processing and autism. According to this model, autism involves early impairments in the capacity for rapid, integrated processing of self-referenced (proprioceptive and interoceptive) and other-referenced (exteroceptive) information.…

In just a short time, mobile devices have revolutionized the way we access information and interact with each other. With an ever expanding list of sensors and features, these devices are also capable of reshaping our experiences with physical systems. Prior efforts to explore this potential of mobile devices have often considered traditional user…

When turning without vision or audition, people tend to perceive their locomotion as a change in heading relative to objects in the remembered surroundings. Such perception of self-rotation depends on sensitivity to information for movement from biomechanical activity of the locomotor system or from inertial activation of the vestibular and…

Background: The purpose of this study was to investigate the kinematic and electromyography strategy used by individuals with intellectual disability to keep equilibrium during anterior-posterior balance on seesaws with different degrees of instability. Method: Six individuals with Down syndrome (DS) and six control group individuals (CG) balanced…

Recent studies suggest motor skills are not entirely spared in individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous reports demonstrated that young adults with ASD were able to land accurately on a target despite increased temporal and spatial variability during their movement. This study explored how a group of adolescents and young…

An individual's a priori talent can affect movement performance during learning. Also, task requirements and motor-perceptual factors are critical to the learning process. This study describes changes in high bar swing performance after a 2-month practice period. Twenty-five novice participants were divided by a priori talent level…

The role of visual feedback during the production of American Sign Language was investigated by comparing the size of signing space during conversations and narrative monologues for normally sighted signers, signers with tunnel vision due to Usher syndrome, and functionally blind signers. The interlocutor for all groups was a normally sighted deaf…

Impressions of force are commonplace in the visual perception of objects interacting. It is proposed that these impressions have their source in haptically mediated experiences of exertion of force in actions on objects. Visual impressions of force in interactions between objects occur by a kind of generalization of the proprioceptive impression…

The effect of writing on the concurrent visual perception of letters was investigated in a series of studies using an interference paradigm. Participants drew shapes and letters while simultaneously visually identifying letters and shapes embedded in noise. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated that letter perception, but not the perception of shapes, was…

This study compared the nature of postural adaptations and control tendencies, between 7 (n = 9) and 11-year-old boys (n = 10) with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) and age-matched, younger (n = 10) and older (n = 9) peers in a leaning task. Examination of anterior-posterior, medio-lateral, maximum and mean area of sway, and path length…