Children's spatial mapping starts out particularly sensitive to 3D wall-like boundaries and develops over early childhood to flexibly include other boundary types. This study investigated whether spatial boundaries influence children's episodic memory, as in adults, and whether this effect is modulated by boundary type. Eighty-one Korean children…

The relation between episodic and semantic memory was examined by testing how semantic knowledge influences children's episodic memory for events and their locations. Five-, six-, and seven-year-olds (N = 87) engaged in events in a children's museum designed as a town. Events were semantically congruent or incongruent with the spatial location…

Cognitive abilities are essential to children's overall growth; thus, the implementation of early and effective training interventions is a major challenge for developmental psychologists and teachers. This study explores whether an intervention simultaneously operating on fluid reasoning (FR), visuospatial, narrative, and motor abilities could…

Through five waves of data collection, this longitudinal study investigated the development of spatial skills in 304 elementary school children (M[subscript age] = 7.64 years) as they progressed from the second to fourth grade. The study focused on whether multiple latent classes with different developmental profiles best explain development.…

Longitudinal associations of domain-general and numerical competencies with individual differences in children's understanding of fractions were investigated. Children (n = 163) were assessed at 6 years of age on domain-general (nonverbal reasoning, language, attentive behavior, executive control, visual-spatial memory) and numerical (number…

Mental abacus (MA) is a technique of performing fast, accurate arithmetic using a mental image of an abacus; experts exhibit astonishing calculation abilities. Over 3 years, 204 elementary school students (age range at outset: 5-7 years old) participated in a randomized, controlled trial to test whether MA expertise (a) can be acquired in standard…

This study explored the structure of verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory in children between ages 4 and 11 years. Multiple tasks measuring 4 different memory components were used to capture the cognitive processes underlying working memory. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the processing component of working memory…

Three studies, involving 72 3-month-old infants, demonstrated that infants remembered some of the original feature combinations of a mobile they had been trained to activate for up to 3 days but forgot all of them after 4 days. Even after 4 days, however, infants remembered the individual features that had entered into the original combinations.…

This study examined developmental trends in object and spatial working memory (WM) using heart rate (HR) to provide an index of covert cognitive processes. Participants in 4 age groups (6-7, 9-10, 11-12, 18-26, n=20 each) performed object and spatial WM tasks, in which each trial was followed by feedback. Spatial WM task performance reached adult…

Two experiments investigated the role of spatial prototypes in estimates of location. Found that adults and children ages 7 to 11 years overestimated distances between target locations in different regions and that none displaced objects toward the region centers. Even with boundaries removed during testing, adults and children overestimated…

Five experiments tested hypothesis that the A-not-B error results from general processes that make goal-directed actions to remembered locations. Findings showed that 2-year-olds' performance on the A trial was accurate. When the object was hidden at Location B, searches after 10-second delay were biased in the direction of Location A. This bias…

In order to determine whether non-Western children would show a memory deficit for contextually organized spatial ability, the performances of 30 Mayan and 30 American nine-year-olds on reconstruction of an organized three-dimensional miniature scene were examined. (MP)

In Experiment I, 24 preschoolers were tested on left-right, vertical-horizontal, and mirror-image oblique discriminations under essentially context-free conditions. Experiment II contrasted children's performance under context-free conditions with their ability to discriminate orientation in the presence of external visual cues. (RH)

After viewing pictures of simple objects varied in color and spatial location, first, third, and fifth graders were assessed for their abilities in automatic processing of spatial and color information. In general, no evidence was found to suggest that the processing strategies of younger children were less sophisticated than those of older…

Examines (1) the effect of increased motor involvement with an environment on children's memory for spatial locations, and (2) the effect of different degrees of motor involvement under intentional and incidental memory conditions. Thirty boys and 30 girls at each of kindergarten and third-grade levels were individually tested in a large-scale,…