Pattern recognition within and across sensory modalities in normal and brain-injured children

Abstract

For normal children, intermodal transfer (from touch to vision or from vision to touch) has been shown to be more difficult than intramodal transfer from vision to vision, but no more difficult than from touch to touch. This study extends the investigation to children with early brain damage and tests the claim that intermodal transfer is particularly vulnerable to such damage. Brain-damaged children do perform more poorly than younger normal children on the intermodal tasks employed, but the brain-injured children did even worse on those intramodal tasks that involved vision alone. An additional experiment showed that normal children performed as badly as the brain-injured as soon as one made the visual presentation of patterns sequential instead of simultaneous.