As a knowable object, the human body is highly complex. Evidence from several converging lines of research, including psychological studies, neuroimaging and clinical neuropsychology, indicates that human body knowledge is widely distributed in the adult brain, and is instantiated in at least three partially independent levels of representation. Sensorimotor body knowledge is responsible for on...

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) display poor visuo-spatial cognition relative to verbal abilities. Furthermore, whilst perceptual abilities are delayed, visuo-spatial construction abilities are comparatively even weaker, and are characterised by a local bias. We investigated whether this differentiation in visuospatial abilities can be explained by a deficit in coding spatial location i...

Evidence from a number of sources now suggests that the visuo-spatial sketchpad (VSSP) of working memory may be composed of two subsystems: one for maintaining visual information and the other for spatial information. In this paper we present three experiments that examine this fractionation using a developmental approach. In Experiment 1, 5-, 8-, and 10-year old children were presented with a ...

Passwords are the almost universal authentication mechanism, even though they are basically flawed and cause problems for users due to poor memorability. Graphical methods of authentication have recently excited some interest but little is known about their actual efficacy. There are basically two types of graphical authentication mechanisms: recognition-based and location-based—also called vis...

Softness perception intrinsically relies on haptic information. However, through everyday experiences we learn correspondences between felt softness and the visual effects of exploratory movements that are executed to feel softness. Here, we studied how visual and haptic information is integrated to assess the softness of deformable objects. Participants discriminated between the softness of tw...

Gender differences in brain structure and function have long been an interest to neuroscientists. One region where these differences have been reported is in the band of white matter that connects the two cerebral hemisphere, the corpus callosum. The current study explores the possibility that differences in cognitive ability contribute to the observed gender effects. The focus here is on visuo...

PURPOSE To find out whether children with epilepsy did show different event-related potentials (ERP) compared to healthy children during performance in a visuo-spatial working memory (WM) task. METHODS Multichannel ERPs were measured during a visuo-spatial backmatching task. A quantitative analysis technique, based on Statistical Parametric Mapping, was used to analyze the ERP data. 62 childr...

This study compares the tendency for numerals to elicit spontaneous perceptions of colour or taste (synaesthesia) with the tendency to visualise numbers as occupying particular visuo-spatial configurations (number forms). The prevalence of number forms was found to be significantly higher in synaesthetes experiencing colour compared both to synaesthetes experiencing taste and to control partici...

Recent research suggests visuo-tactile binding is temporally extended in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), although it is not clear whether this specifically underlies altered body representation in this population. In the current study children and adolescents with ASD, and typically developing controls, placed their hand into mediated reality system (MIRAGE) and saw two identical live video im...

We present a roadmap to a Human Activity Language (HAL) for symbolic manipulation of visual and motor information in a sensory-motor system model. The visual perception subsystem translates a visual representation of action into our visuo-motor language. One instance of this perception process could be achieved by a Motion Capture system. We captured almost 90 different human actions in order t...