
sensory dominance
in autistic imbecile children and controls
in a previous experiment (hermelin and
o'connor, 1964) it was found that autistic
and control imbecile children responded most
frequently to a light stimulus in conditions of
bimodal, simultaneous stimulation.  however,
the role of the relative intensity level of the
stimuli remained to be determined.  in the
present experiment a light and a sound, or a
light and a verbal command were presented
simultaneously in various intensity combina-
tions.  all responses, irrespective of the stim-
ulus to which they were made, were
rewarded.  autistic, mongol, and nonmongol
imbecile children were tested.  in addition to
a tendency for visual dominance results
showed that independent of modality, high
intensities affected all groups.  nonmongol
imbecile children also responded significantly
more frequently to the verbal than to the
sound stimulus, while the other two groups
did not.
