Daily Occupations,Routines, and Social Participation of Homeless Young People

Homelessness disrupts young people’s participation in the productive occupations that facilitate transition to adulthood, impairs social connections, and has a disorganizing effect on their time use. Semi-structured focus group interviews were used to explore how 19 homeless young people perceived their daily routines, meaningful occupations, and social participation to be impacted by the experience of homelessness. Occupational therapy practitioners can use the findings from this study to inform the development of comprehensive community-based programming aimed at increasing social opportunities, developing balanced, healthy routines, decreasing intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to residential stability, and promoting participation in productive and leisure occupations.     

Haptic subitizing across the fingers

Numerosity judgments of small sets of items (≤ 3) are generally fast and error free, while response times and error rates increase rapidly for larger numbers of items. We investigated an efficient process used for judging small numbers of items (known as subitizing) in active touch. We hypothesized that this efficient process for numerosity judgment might be related to stimulus properties that allow for efficient (parallel) search. Our results showed that subitizing was not possible for raised lines among flat surfaces, whereas this type of stimulus could be detected in parallel over the fingers. However, subitizing was possible when the number of fingers touching a surface had to be judged while the other fingers were lowered in mid-air. In the latter case, the lack of tactile input is essential, since subitizing was not enabled by differences in proprioceptive information from the fingers. Our results show that subitizing using haptic information from the fingers is possible only when some fingers receive tactile information while other fingers do not.     

Haptic pop-out in a hand sweep

Visually, a red item is easily detected among green items, whereas a mirrored S among normal Ss is not. In visual search, the former is known as the pop-out effect. In daily life, people often also conduct haptic (tactual) searches, for instance, when trying to find keys in their pocket. The aim of the present research was to determine whether there is a haptic version of the pop-out effect. Blindfolded subjects had to search for a target item which differed in roughness from the surrounding distractor items. We report reaction time slopes as low as 20 ms/item. When target and distractor identities were interchanged the slopes increased indicating a search asymmetry. Furthermore, we show that differences in search slope were accompanied by search strategy differences. In some conditions a single-hand sweep over the display was sufficient, while in others a more detailed search strategy was used. By relating haptic search slopes to parallel and serial search strategies we show, for the first time, that pop-out effects occur under free manual exploration.