The First International Leo Kanner Colloquium on Child Development, Devia tions, and Treatment explores relationships between experimental research, normal development, and interventions, with early infantile autism as a reference model of "relatively unambiguous abnormal development." Sponsored by the Treatment and Education of Autistic and related Com munications handicapped CHildren (TEACCH) Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the colloquium tackled the challenge of facilitat ing communications among scientists of different disciplines working in a spe cialized area. The meeting proved successful in generating an interplay and information exchange among scientists of diverse academic and professional orientation, who, if not completely able to agree on common factors, did nevertheless achieve awareness and clarification of their differences. The TEACCH conference and this volume have implications for all research efforts, within and outside the domain of mental health. This is particularly so at a time of limited dollar resources for research support. The present and foresee able future represent such a time-one when communication among fields, resource competition between basic and applied research, biomedical versus psychosocial research, and the question of research utilization assume a new commanding significance. Thus the question of accountability for research has come to the fore.

‘How do children see the world?’ is a question of immense importance which fascinates not only psychologists but also parents and all those concerned with education. In this English translation, first published in 1976, the author, who was Professor of Psychology at the René Descartes University in Paris, provided the most comprehensive review at the time of the development of visual perception in children, a field to which she herself had made a substantial contribution. Her book, which gave the first comprehensive study of the relationship between cognitive development and perceptual activities in small children, explores how they interpret visual information and gradually build up a picture of the world. The author had devoted fifteen years to research on the visual world of the child and possessed an exhaustive knowledge of the experimental literature on the subject in English, French, Russian and other languages. She saw perception as a form of knowledge which the child exploits and adapts in a variety of ways at different stages of development. This is brilliantly demonstrated in her own research on the strategies children use in judging things as ‘different’ or ‘the same’ and the way these relate to the structure of their perceptual organisation. This book is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in developmental and cognitive psychology; it also provides an object lesson in the application of experimental methods. In addition the organisation of the material made it a valuable textbook for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate teaching and will still be of interest in its historical context today.

The chapters in this volume are drawn from the presentations delivered at a symposium on Developmental Disabilities in the Preschool Child. This sym posium was held under the auspices of The Institute for Pediatric Service of Johnson and Johnson Baby Products. It was co-sponsored by The College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Rutgers Medical School, and The In stitute for the Study of Exceptional Children, Educational Testing Service. The symposium was held in the Fall of 1979 in Chicago, Illinois and the participants, including Ph. D . 's, Ed. D . 's, and M. D . 's, represented the interdisciplinary approach which characterized the meetings. The interdisciplinary set of speakers was matched by an equally diverse audience who represented almost every profes sional group concerned with the needs of disabled children and their families. Because of the successful information exchange that took place, a published volume of the proceedings was determined to be useful for others who were not able to attend. To all those who toil to help developmentally disabled children and their families we dedicate this volume. Michael Lewis Lawrence T. Taft vii CONTENTS Introduction xiii Part I-Sensory Development 1 / Handicapped Child - Facts of Life 3 Me"itt B. Low 2 / Theoretical Issues in the Early Development of Visual Perception 9 Joseph F. Fagan III and Patricia Ann Shepherd 3 / Clinical Appraisal of Vision 35 Richard N.