Babies have ‘intuitive physics’ knowledge at birth?

A US Northwestern University study has found that the evidence for intuitive physics occurs in infants as young as two months – the earliest age at which testing can occur.

Intuitive physics includes skills that adults use all the time. For example, when a glass of milk falls off the table, a person might try to catch the cup, but they are not likely to try to catch the milk that spills out.

The person doesn’t have to consciously think about what to do because the brain processes the information and the person simply reacts.

The majority of an adult’s everyday interactions with the world are automatic, and researchers believe infants have the same ability to form expectations, predicting the behaviour of objects and substances with which they interact.

But the world is not made up of objects alone, and Northwestern researchers looked at whether babies can distinguish between objects in their different forms i.e. one's that can be held, touched or thrown, versus substances such as gas, liquids that can flow and may be drinkable.

According to a review of literature, infants show an understanding that unsupported objects will fall and that hidden objects do not cease to exist. Scientific testing also has shown that by five months, infants have developed the expectation that non-cohesive substances like a gas, sand or water are not solid.

“I think liquid is the best example of a non object that you interact with — a baby has to drink liquid every single day,” said lead author Susan J. Hespos, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

“It’s a universal experience with milk or water. We did studies on whether babies expected water to pour or tumble from an upended cup.

By five months of age, babies expect both water and sand to pour, so we have clear evidence that this type of physical knowledge is available early in development.”

While the intuitive physics knowledge is believed to be present at birth, co-author Kristy van Marle, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, believes parents can assist skill development through normal interaction, such as playing and talking with the child and encouraging him or her to interact with objects.

“Natural interaction with the child, such as talking to him or her, playing peek-a-boo and allowing him or her to handle safe objects, is the best method for child development,” van Marle said.

“Natural interaction with the parent and objects in the world gives the child all the input that evolution has prepared the child to seek, accept and use to develop intuitive physics.”

Read more on 'Intuitive Physics' in this paper by McCloskey 

Also you can read another, older (2001), paper; "Are 'intuitive physics' and
'intuitive psychology' independent? - Testing children with Asperger Syndrome

Autism: Brainwaves 'show risk from age of six months'

It may be possible to detect autism at a much earlier age than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers.

A study published in Current Biology identified differences in infants' brainwaves from as early as six months.

Behavioural symptoms of autism typically develop between a child's first and second birthdays.

Autism charities said identifying the disorder at an earlier stage could help with treatment.

It is thought that one in every 100 children has an autism spectrum disorder in the UK. It affects more boys than girls. While there is no "cure", education and behavioural programmes can help.

One of the researchers, Prof Mark Johnson from Birkbeck College, University of London, told the BBC: "The prevailing view is that if we are able to intervene before the onset of full symptoms, such as a training programme, at least in some cases we can maybe alleviate full symptoms."

His team looked for the earliest signs of autism in 104 children aged between six and 10 months. Half were known to be at risk of the disorder because they had on older sibling who had been diagnosed with autism. The rest were low risk.

Older children with autism can show a lack of eye contact, so the babies were shown pictures of people's faces that switched between looking at or away from the baby.

Sensors attached to the scalp looked for differences in brain activity.

In low-risk babies, or high-risk babies that did not develop autism, there was a large difference in the brainwaves when looking at each type of image.

There was a much smaller difference in the brainwaves of babies who developed autism.

'Very effective'

Prof Johnson said: "It is important to note it is not a 100% predictor. We had babies who flagged up warning signs who did not develop autism."

There were also babies who did develop autism who had low-risk brainwaves. The test would need to be more accurate before it was used routinely.

Prof Tony Charman, Centre for Research in Autism and Education at the Institute of Education, said: "Differences in the use of eye gaze to regulate social interaction are already a well-recognised early feature in many children with autism from the second year of life.

"Future studies will be required to determine whether measurements of brain function such as those used in our study might one day play a role in helping to identify children at an even earlier age."

Christine Swabey from the charity Autistica said: "The hope is that this important research will lead to improved identification and access to services for future generations.

"Ultimately, the earlier we can identify autism and provide early intervention, the better the outcomes will be."

Dr Georgina Gomez-de-la-Cuesta from the National Autistic Society said: "Further research to investigate these differences will eventually lead to earlier recognition of the condition.

"Early intervention is very effective in supporting those with autism, so recognition in infancy can only be beneficial in helping individuals with autism reach their full potential.

"However, this important research is still in its early stages, and larger studies looking at several early markers of autism will be necessary before a robust clinical diagnosis could be possible at such a young age."

When “OK?” is not OK!

When asking a child to do something positive, like go to bed or to stop doing something negative, like whining, some mothers and fathers routinely attach the word “OK?” to the end of their response.

It sounds like this:
“It’s time for bed now, honey. OK?”
“I want you to stop whining and use your big girl voice, OK?”

This is bad practice. Why?

First of all, there’s no need for the extra comment. Requests should be kept simple, short and straightforward.

Second, the “OK?” is not a benign comment, it’s a troublemaker. The “OK?” communicates to the child that the parent is anxious about whether or not the youngster is going to cooperate.

Kids can sense this anxiety in their parent’s voice immediately, even though the child may be only two or three years old. The “OK?” tells the child right away that the parent is vulnerable and unsure of herself or himself.

Third, the troublesome “OK?” implies that at this point the child has a choice in the matter.

Now how many kids like to go to bed at night or actually want to stop whining? Not very many.

So combine the kid’s natural aversion to cooperating with the parent’s uncertainty and what do you get? You get the potential for a bad scene complete with arguing, yelling and tantrums.

So next time you want a child to cooperate and you need to make a simple request, DO NOT put “OK?” on the end of it!

Dyslexia: Coloured Reading Rulers

If your child is having problems with reading he or she might be suffering from visual stress. The symptoms of visual stress whilst reading are: whole words or letters moving on the page, blurred text, distorted text, spinning text, seeing shapes within the text and feeling sick whilst reading, headaches and migraines.


As you can imagine, the effect of visual stress on a reader is profound. Speaking from my own experience I used to feel sick whilst reading and understandably hated reading for most of my childhood.

The symptoms of visual stress effect how a child learns to read and understand what they have read because it inhibits the ability to recognise words quickly and to read smoothly.

How can you tell if your child has visual stress?
This is a question that pops up over and over again but is fairly simple to answer. Ask you child about how they feel when they read. Do they feel sick, dizzy or do they start to get a headache?

Ask if the words stay still or move around the page or blurr. You may also notice that they turn their head or slide the book to the side as they read.

Often children with visual stress report that the text is clearer if they move the book to the side and look at the words through the corners of their eyes.

There is a useful software package to determine if you or your child is suffering from visual stress and I would recommend it for schools and colleges.

If you’re a parent there is a simple way to find out if your child’s reading problems are caused by visual stress.

Coloured Overlays
Coloured overlays are a simple and inexpensive solution to visual stress for children with reading difficulties.

They won’t cure dyslexia but they can significantly help with reading. A coloured overlay ruler is similar in size to a 6 inch school ruler and comes in a variety of colours.

By placing the right colour overlay over text reading becomes much easier because the contrast stops the words from moving or blurring.

How do you know which colour to use?
The overlays come in 10 colours and there are 5 which have proven to be the most popular. So you can order a set of 5 or 10 overlays and simply test them by placing them over the text and seeing which colour works best.

Further info and where to purchase coloured overlay reading rulers and reading overlays.

Mrs. Books - Apples Gosh Golly - YouTube

A Children's Educational video. Sharing Fun with the whole Family! Counting Funny, Silly Apples from 1 to 10 with Mrs. Books. Wonderful Music to Sing and Dance Along with too!

Audio Description - RNIB

Audio Description

On the RNIB website is:

• What is audio description?
• Where can I get audio description?
• Try audio description
• Audio description campaign
• Advice for professionals
• Award winning RNIB team
• More information

Everything you need to know about audio description (AD) and where it is available.

Amazon eBook readers and apps - RNIB

Amazon eBook readers and apps

You will find the following on the RNIB website:

• Kindle (reader)
• Kindle Keyboard (reader)
• Kindle for PC with accessibility (app)
• Other Kindle apps
• Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire (readers)
• Kindle DX (reader)

Amazon are a US company that make some of their products available in the UK. The first four items mentioned below are available in the UK now, the next two are expected to be available soon and the last - the Kindle DX - is only available through the US Amazon website.
Apart from the differences between readers and apps given below, there are other differences which are not so obvious. For example, some newspaper and magazine titles are available for the readers but not the apps.

Dyslexia: MRI Brain Scans Spot Early Signs

Instead of waiting for a child to experience reading delays, scientists now say they can identify the reading problem even before children start school, long before they become labeled as poor students and begin to lose confidence in themselves.

Although typically diagnosed during the second or third grade of school - around age 7 or 8 - a team from Children's Hospital Boston said they could see signs of the disease on brain scans in children as early as 4 and 5, a time when studies show children are best able to respond to interventions.

"We call it the dyslexia paradox," said Nadine Gaab of the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Children's, whose study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Gaab said most children are not diagnosed until third grade, but interventions work best in younger children, hopefully before they begin to learn to read.

"Often, by the time they get a diagnosis, they usually have experienced three years of peers telling them they are stupid, parents telling them they are lazy.

We know they have reduced self esteem. They are really struggling," Gaab said in a telephone interview.

Her study builds on an emerging understanding of dyslexia as a problem with recognizing and manipulating the individual sounds that form language, which is known as phonological processing.
In order to read, children must map the sounds of spoken language onto specific letters that make up words. Children with dyslexia struggle with this mapping process.

"The beauty is spoken language can present before written language so people can look for symptoms," said Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a director of the Center for Dyslexia and Creativity at Yale University.

Signs of early dyslexia might include difficulty with rhyming, mispronouncing words or confusing similar-sounding words.

"Those are all very early symptoms," Shaywitz said.

Dyslexia affects roughly 5 percent to 17 percent of all children and up to 1 in 2 children with a family history of the disorder will struggle with reading, have poor spelling and experience difficulty decoding words.

In her study, Gaab and colleagues scanned the brains of 36 preschool children while they did a number of tasks, such as trying to decide if two words start with the same sound.

They found that during these tasks, children who had a family history of dyslexia had less brain activity in certain regions of the brain than did children of similar ages, intelligence and socioeconomic status.

Older children and adults with dyslexia have dysfunction in these same areas of the brain, which include the junctions between the occipital and temporal lobes and the temporal and parietal lobes in the back of the brain.

Gaab said the study shows that when children predisposed to dyslexia did these tasks, their brains did not use the area typically used for processing this information. This problem occurred even before the children started learning to read.

"The important point of this paper is it shows the need to look for signs of dyslexia earlier," said April Benasich, director of the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, who was not part of the study.

Benasich studies language processing in even younger children - babies who have a family history of learning disorders.

"There is evidence to suggest that what is thought to be reading failure is there before the kids fail," she said.

Gaab said her study is too small to form the basis of any test for dyslexia but her team has just won a grant from the National Institutes of Health to do a larger study.

Ultimately, she hopes parents will be able to go to their pediatrician and ask for their child to be assessed.

"Families often know that their child has dyslexia as early as kindergarten, but they can't get interventions at their schools," she said in a statement.

"If we can show that we can identify these kids early, schools may be encouraged to develop programs," she said.

The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism & Special Needs: Touch

Fox TV's new Kiefer Sutherland series Touch premieres in two days, on Wednesday January 25th. We're intrigued, and watchful.

The series revolves around a non-verbal child, Jake, who understands numerical patterns other people can't perceive -- and his father Martin's attempts to understand not only what Jake is trying to communicate, but Jake himself.

From the series description at Fox.com:

Blending science, spirituality and emotion, the series will follow seemingly unrelated people all over the world whose lives affect each other in ways seen and unseen, known and unknown. At the story’s center is MARTIN BOHM (Kiefer Sutherland), a widower and single father, haunted by an inability to connect to his emotionally challenged 11-year-old son, JAKE (David Mazouz). Caring, intelligent and thoughtful, Martin has tried everything to reach his son. But Jake never speaks, shows little emotion, and never allows himself to be touched by anyone, including Martin. Jake is obsessed with numbers—writing long strings of them in his ever-present notebooks—and with discarded cell phones.

Some folks are already skeptical. Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress is critical of series co-creator Kring for "inventing a magical alternative to autism," and Ellen Seidman at Parents.com says:

I like it in concept because it’s a TV program about a kid with special needs, which isn’t very common (understatement alert). I don’t like it concept because I’m concerned it’s going to take the focus away from the amazing reality of our kids—something many people still don’t get. And, count on it, some people are going to think kids with autism actually can do this, feeding into the stereotype of savant abilities.

Matt Web Mitovitch of TV line reports that series star Sutherland believes Touch will highlight the potential of those with autism, and the need for the rest of society to try to better understand autistics:

“The Danny Glover [professor] character is interesting,” says Sutherland. “He believes that we have misdiagnosed a group of people that actually are at a much more advanced form of communication, but because we don’t understand it we’ve diagnosed them with what we can best understand.”

That exploration of what autism is and could be was born of the fact that [series co-creator] Kring has a son who lives with the condition; as such, he’s taking care to see that Touch‘s fictional aspects are founded in scientific fact.

Autism is no longer mentioned on Fox's official Touch site, but Fox secured an autism and special education expert, Joanne Lara, as technical consultant on the pilot. Joanne also advised on the role of Jake, the eleven-year-old protagonist. We spoke with Joanne last week; here's the part of our conversation that centered on the series' special needs themes.

Improve handwriting with small changes

The best way to encourage children to change is to offer them something they want and then let them find out how to go about getting it. A bit like the carrot on a stick.

Find out how to write neatly by observing someone who is a neat writer and notice what they do that is different from what you do, be like a detective and watch them really closely, just what is it that they are doing differently?

Helping children learn from each other and discovering the information in a fun and enjoyable way will help them be better at remembering the things they must do to improve their handwriting.
If you don’t get the chance to observe someone, here are some things that you can do:

1. Ensure that your child is sat with both feet flat on the floor and sat up straight. This helps concentration and gets children ready to write. Slouching over their desk and resting their head on their hand is not good for being alert and concentration. It could also mean that they need to visit an optician that specialises in helping children with handwriting and vision problems.
2. Turn the paper about 20 degrees away from the hand that they write with, this will give their elbow room to move as they write and their hand can relax on the paper.
3. Hold the pencil with a tripod grip, this is the most effective way to hold a pencil for neat handwriting.
4. Grip the pencil by imagining it is a baby bird, you don’t want it to fly away but you don’t want to squash it either. This is helpful for
   children to understand just how tightly they need to hold it, especially for children who hold on to their pencil so tightly their fingers go white at the knuckles.
5. If your child is having problems holding the pencil then invest in a good quality pencil grip to help them master the tripod grip with ease.

Sometimes there’s resistance to these changes which could mean your child is not ready or wanting to change. Encourage small changes with lots of fun practise focusing on pencil holding skills regularly, not just with writing but with drawing and painting. They will take time to master, but once mastered, they will lead to success in handwriting for a lifetime.
You can learn more about how to hold a pencil properly and find the right kind of pencil grips for adults and children here
Improve handwriting with small changes