Early onset blindness allows one to investigate how the human brain adapts to sensory experience in infancy and early childhood. Over the past decade, lesion, functional and structural imaging studies have accumulated evidence that severe perturbations to visual experience alter the functional and structural organization of the human brain. Visual deprivation can induce plastic changes not only...

Our sensory receptors are faced with an onslaught of different environmental inputs. Each sensory event or encounter with an object involves a distinct combination of physical energy sources impinging upon receptors. In the rodent whisker system, each primary afferent neuron located in the trigeminal ganglion innervates and responds to a single whisker and encodes a distinct set of physical sti...

The sensory representations and response properties of neurons in the multisensory layers of the superior colliculus (SC) of the cat and monkey are strikingly similar. In both species, significant numbers of unimodal visual, auditory, and somatosensory neurons are intermixed, and share modality-specific stimulus selectivities. In addition, these neurons have receptive fields that are organized ...

In this study, a psychoacoustical and connectionist modeling framework is proposed for the investigation of musical cognition. It is suggested that music perception involves the manipulation of 1) sensory representations that have correlations with psychoacoustical features of the stimulus, and 2) abstract representations of the statistical regularities underlying a particular musical syntax. I...

Worker honeybees proceed through a sequence of tasks, passing from hive and guard duties to foraging activities. The underlying neuronal changes accompanying and possibly mediating these behavioral transitions are not well understood. We studied changes in the microglomerular organization of the mushroom bodies, a brain region involved in sensory integration, learning, and memory, during adult ...

OBJECTIVE This quasi-experimental study sought to determine whether children with possible sensory processing deficits, as measured by the Sensory Profile, performed less well on an occupational performance measure compared to children with typical Sensory Profile scores. METHOD Sixty-eight children were administered both the Assessment of Motor Process Skills (AMPS) and the Sensory Profile. ...

Parents, teachers, and people who themselves experience sensory and movement differences have consistently reported disturbances of sensation and movement associated with autism. Our review of the literature has revealed both historical and recent references to and research about sensory and movement difference characteristics and symptoms for individuals with autism. What is notably infrequent...

An organism's awareness of its surroundings is dependent on sensory function. As antennas to our external environment, cilia are involved in fundamental biological processes such as olfaction, photoreception, and touch. The olfactory system has adapted this organelle for its unique sensory function and optimized it for detection of external stimuli. The elongated and tapering structure of olfac...