Background: A small amount of research with individuals who have Williams Syndrome (WS) suggests that children with the condition may be vulnerable to sensory processing abnormalities and present with repetitive and restricted behaviours. Methods: Parents of twenty-one children with WS aged 6-15 years completed a semistructured interview designed to elicit the form, frequency, impact and develo...

What determines how close you choose to stand to someone? Why do some people prefer farther distances than others? We hypothesized that an important factor is one's sensory sensitivity level, i.e. how sensitive one is to nearby visual stimulation, noise, touch or smell. This study characterizes the behavioral, hormonal and electrophysiological metrics of interpersonal distance (IPD) preferences...

Human information processing is constrained by limited attentional resources. A matter of ongoing debate in multisensory research is whether attentional resources are shared or distinct across sensory modalities. Previous research suggested that the type of tasks that humans perform in separate sensory modalities determines whether attentional resources are shared or distinct across sensory mod...

OBJECTIVE Research regarding sensory processing and adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is limited. This study aimed to compare sensory processing patterns of groups of higher education students with ADHD or ASD and to explore the implications of these disorders for their college life. METHOD The Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile was ad...

The migraine attack is characterized by alterations in sensory perception, such as photophobia or allodynia, which have in common an uncomfortable amplification of the percept. It is not known how these changes arise. We evaluated the ability of cortical spreading depression (CSD), the proposed mechanism of the migraine aura, to shape the cortical activity that underlies sensory perception. We ...

We identified clusters of atypical sensory functioning adults with ASC by hierarchical cluster analysis. A new scale for commonly self-reported sensory reactivity was used as a measure. In a low frequency group (n = 37), all subscale scores were relatively low, in particular atypical sensory/motor reactivity. In the intermediate group (n = 17) hyperreactivity, sensory interests and sensory/moto...

Human visual processing is subject to a dynamic influx of visual information. Visual working memory (VWM) allows for maintaining relevant visual information available for subsequent behavior. According to the dominating view, VWM recruits sensory processing areas to maintain this visual information online (i.e., the ‘sensory recruitment’ hypothesis). In her recent Trends in Cognitive Sciences a...

Patients with functional gastrointestinal disorders may have visceral sensory dysfunction so that physiological stimuli induce their symptoms. The clinical significance of altered perception—that is, its relation to clinical symptoms—remains unclear. Data indicate that sensory dysfunction is associated with altered reflex activity. Hence evidence of combined sensory-reflex dysfunction as a comm...

Neurons in cortical area MT have localized receptive fields (RF) representing the contralateral hemifield and play an important role in processing visual motion. We recorded the activity of these neurons during a behavioral task in which two monkeys were required to discriminate and remember visual motion presented in the ipsilateral hemifield. During the task, the monkeys viewed two stimuli, s...