Comparison of Cross-modal and Intra-modal Form Recognition in Children with Learning Disabilities*

Abstract

This study was conducted to examine the idea that learning and perception will be more firmly established when they arise from multi-sensory input than they would be if only one sensory modality was used. This experiment investigates the influence of visual and tactual training and test modalities in relation to form recognition in children with learning disabilities. The procedure consisted of visual or tactual training with unfamiliar stimulus forms followed by recognition tests on these forms in either the same or the other modality. The 48 subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following training-test modality groups: visual-visual, visual-tactual, tactual-tactual, and tactual-visual. A significant main effect was found for training modalities with vision found to be better than touch. The training-test interaction was also found to be significant, with the visual-visual sequence leading to the fewest errors.