People associate numbers and horizontal space. This association has been demonstrated by the so-called SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes)-effect, with Western participants responding faster to larger numbers with their right hand and vice versa for smaller numbers. SNARC-like effects have also been reported for preschoolers.…

Comparing places represents one of the most traditional threads of comparative inquiry. However, international and comparative (adult) education research has to date focused on comparing places more in the sense of territorial entities. In contrast, this paper moves away from understandings of national or regional territories as given,…

Decades of research have demonstrated the correlation of spatial abilities to chemistry achievement and career selection. Nonetheless, reviews have highlighted the need and scarcity of explicit spatial instruction to promote spatial skills. Therefore, the goal of this literature review is to summarize what has been done during the past decade in…

As the traditional toys of the past are quickly being replaced with electronically "enhanced" toys, it is important to understand how these changes impact parent--child interactions, especially in light of the evidence that the richness and variety of these interactions have long-term effects on diverse areas of cognition (Hart &…

Numbers are fundamental entities in mathematics, but their cognitive bases are unclear. Abundant research points to linear space as a natural grounding for number representation. But, is number representation fundamentally spatial? We disentangle number representation from standard number-to-line reporting methods, and compare numerical…

The main purpose of this study was to determine significant positive effects among the use of three different types of drafting models, and to identify whether any differences exist towards promotion of spatial visualization ability for students in Industrial Technology and Technology Education courses. In particular, the study compared the use of…

Using head-mounted eye tracker material, we assessed spatial recognition abilities (e.g., reaction to object permutation, removal or replacement with a new object) in participants with intellectual disabilities. The "Intellectual Disabilities (ID)" group (n = 40) obtained a score totalling a 93.7% success rate, whereas the "Normal Control" group…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder associated with severe visuospatial deficits, relatively strong language skills, heightened social interest, and increased attention to faces. On the basis of the visuospatial deficits, this disorder has been characterized primarily as a deficit of the dorsal stream, the occipitoparietal brain regions…

Previous research has demonstrated a female advantage, albeit imperfectly, on tests of object location memory where object identity information is readily available. However, spatial and visual elements are often confounded in the experimental tasks used. Here spatial and visual memory performance was compared in 30 men and 30 women by presenting…

In 3 experiments, a total of 151 monolingual and bilingual 6-year-old children performed similarly on measures of language and cognitive ability; however, bilinguals solved the global-local and trail-making tasks more rapidly than monolinguals. This bilingual advantage was found not only for the traditionally demanding conditions (incongruent…

Working memory is devoted to the temporary storage and on-line manipulation of information. Recently, an integrative system termed the episodic buffer has been proposed to integrate and hold information being entered or retrieved from episodic memory. Although the brain system supporting such an integrative buffer is still in debate, the medial…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the "g" loadings and specific effects of the core and diagnostic composite scores from the Differential Abilities Scales, Second Edition (DAS-II; Elliott, 2007a). Scores from a subset of the DAS-II standardization sample for ages 3:6 to 17:11 were submitted to principal factor analysis. Four…

Autism involves various perceptual benefits and deficits, but it is unclear if the disorder also involves anomalous audiovisual integration. To address this issue, we compared the performance of high-functioning adults with autism and matched controls on experiments investigating the audiovisual integration of speech, spatiotemporal relations, and…

Many efforts have been made to determine and explain differential gender performance on large-scale mathematics assessments. A well-agreed-on conclusion is that gender differences are contextualized and vary across math domains. This study investigated the pattern of gender differences by item domain (e.g., Space and Shape, Quantity) and item type…

Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) is a standardised test that is commonly used to obtain a non-verbal reasoning score for children. As the RCPM involves the matching of a target to a pattern it is also considered to be a visuo-spatial perception task. RCPM is therefore frequently used in studies in Williams Syndrome (WS), in order to…