No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that relate to successful adult outcomes for 28 individuals with visual impairment ages 23-30. The primary dependent variable was current employment. Independent living and completion of postsecondary educational program were secondary, related outcome measures. A secondary goal of this research was to explore self-perceived aptitude in specific skills that are related to adult outcomes and to understand how and how well participants learned these skills.A mixed-methods design was implemented and quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a highly structured 151-item telephone survey. A series of Fisher's Exact and Mann Whitney-U tests were run to explore statistically significant relationships between variables. Past employment experience was positively related to current employment. Receipt of Social Security benefits and profound vision loss were negatively related to current employment. The longer a participant had been out of high school, the more likely he/she was to have a postsecondary educational degree.Eight essential skills were examined: daily living, college preparation, social, self-advocacy, technology, transportation management, and job seeking. Overall on a scale of 1-10, participants rated their aptitude and training in essential skills areas high. Job seeking was scored the lowest and those who had worked in the past five years rated their job seeking skills higher than those without past work experience. Adults who had completed a postsecondary educational degree rated their college preparation skills higher than those who had not completed a degree program. Those who were living independently rated their overall daily living skills higher than those who were living with a parent or parents.Qualitative data suggest that some skills, such as transportation management and technology, were taught primarily by professionals in the field of visual impairment. In contrast, daily living, social and self-advocacy skills were often learned from the support of family or friends. Many adults reported that they did not receive direct instruction in social and self-advocacy skills; instead they learned them on their own. Further empirical research is needed to understand best practices for integrating effective instruction in compensatory training and their relationship to successful adult outcomes.

More than 60% of the adult population in the United States is overweight, and obesity has reached epidemic proportions in this country. Childhood obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and the health consequences are reflected in the rising cost of health care. There has also been a significant drop in physical activity across the country and physical education is no longer required in middle schools. The lack of physical activity and issues of weight can compromise the ability of the individual who is blind or visually impaired to maneuver through the environment safely and efficiently. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of itinerant teachers of students with visual impairments about the importance of physical activity for their students with visual impairments and its effect on academic success and social relationship.Data was gathered from 175 teachers of students with visual impairments concerning their perceptions regarding the importance of physical activity and obesity and their relationship with academic success and social relationships. The teachers indicated that physical activity for their students is very important. They described a multitude of barriers that account for a lack of involvement in the general physical education classes in which they were enrolled.Teachers reported on their own personal physical activity levels in relationship to the importance they placed on their students' need to be active. The teachers did not indicate that being overweight was a particular issue with their visually impaired students, but they acknowledged that being overweight and a lack of physical activity create additional barriers for academic success and appropriate social relationships.The teachers also reported that the same barriers in physical education classes and access to recreation activities in the community that have been listed in past research studies were still in existence, and these barriers were also part of their dilemma in creating positive physical activity experiences for their students who are visually impaired. This study validated the necessity of further research to find the effective intervention strategies and programs to increase physical activity of students with visual impairments.

This study was designed to test the claim that a deficit in low-level visual processing is a major factor in the etiology of developmental dyslexia. The transient and sustained pathways are neuro-anatomical pathways which underlie low level visual processing. Dyslexics are hypothesized to suffer from a transient pathway deficit which manifests itself in reading difficulties. Normal and disabled adult readers were compared on two visual processing tasks. One task measured the contrast threshold of subjects for flickering sinewave gratings; normal and disabled readers did not differ in contrast sensitivity. On the second task--a visual search task--disabled readers were consistently slower than normal readers, rather than showing the pattern of performance predicted by the transient deficit model; the results provide little evidence for a transient pathway deficit. The results of this and related studies are discussed; it is concluded that empirical evidence for a transient pathway deficit in dyslexia is equivocal.

This study was designed to investigate the effect of background on the disappearance of luminous figures. The basic observation is the Ditchburn-Riggs effect obtained with stabilized images. Stabilized images of simple visual objects, like straight lines, disappear and reappear rapidly from time to time. Pritchard, Heron, and Hebb (1960) observed that stabilized images of complex figures disappear and reappear in a meaningful fashion. McKinney (1963) demonstrated a similar phenomenon with luminous figures in the darkroom. He observed that luminous figures also tend to disappear and reappear like stabilized images. McKinney showed that there are more disappearances when the figure is steadily viewed than when the eyes are moved along the figures. In a recent paper, Hart (1964) reported that disappearance is greater at the fixation point than at other points. Cohen (1961) found that a stabilized line seemed to disappear less when seen with an adjacent parallel line than when seen alone. [...]