Developmental Trajectories and Normative Profiles of Motion and Form Perception

The research focuses on the study of the methods useful to evaluate the developmental trajectories for global motion perception and global form perception. The studies aim to present two different instruments created in order to evaluate the dorsal and ventral streams functionalities and to analyze their psychometric characteristics. The first study presents the Motion and Form perception tests as new tools to investigate motion and form perception accuracy. The use of these tests allows to cope with some of the criticism reported in other studies presented in literature. The tests have been evaluated in a large sample of children of different ages. The second study evaluates the applicability of a specific psychophysical function which allows to analyze the accuracy profiles obtained by Motion and Form coherence test. The response profile of the two tasks are fitted with a half-normal distribution function, that estimates the discrimination performance (i.e. the number of correct responses) on the basis of the coherence level of a stimulus. Moreover, the use of the function allows to statistically define the perceptive thresholds of the two test and to compare them. The third study presented analyzes the developmental trajectories of motion detection and form discrimination abilities in a sample of typically developing children (4 to 13 years) and adults. Moreover, this study allows to define the normative scores for motion coherence and form coherence tests calculated with different normative indexes in the different age groups. The fourth study investigates if motion and form tests can recognize specific deficits in clinical populations. The differences between motion and form perception accuracy are evaluated in children with different genetic syndromes (Noonan syndrome and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome) and in controls. The different populations show specific results in motion and form perception abilities