Geometry is one of the highest achievements of our species, but its foundations are obscure. Consistent with longstanding suggestions that geometrical knowledge is rooted in processes guiding navigation, the present study examines potential sources of geometrical knowledge in the navigation processes by which young children establish their sense…

The integrated use of spatial and temporal information seems to support the separation of two sensory streams. The present study tested whether this facilitation depends on the encoding of sensory stimuli in externally anchored spatial coordinate systems. Fifty-nine children between 5 and 12 years as well as 12 young adults performed a crossmodal…

The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet…

Performance is often impaired linearly with increasing angular disparity between two objects in tasks that measure mental rotation or object recognition. But increased angular disparity is often accompanied by changes in the similarity between views of an object, confounding the impact of the two factors in these tasks. We examined separately the…

The "correspondence problem" is a classic issue in vision and cognition. Frequent perceptual disruptions, such as saccades and brief occlusion, create gaps in perceptual input. How does the visual system establish correspondence between objects visible before and after the disruption? Current theories hold that object correspondence is established…

Recognizing relational similarity relies on the ability to understand that defining object properties might not lie in the objects individually, but in the relations of the properties of various object to each other. This aptitude is highly relevant for many important human skills such as language, reasoning, categorization and understanding…

Reorientation tasks, in which disoriented participants attempt to relocate objects using different visual cues, have previously been understood to depend on representing aspects of the global organisation of the space, for example its major axis for judgements based on geometry. Careful analysis of the visual information available for these tasks…

Examined whether 6.5- and 5.5-month-old infants believe, like 11-month-old infants, that a moving object's size affects how far a stationary object is displaced in a collision. After a habituation event, tests indicated that the 6.5-month-old infants and 5.5-month-old female infants believed the size of the moving object affected the collision…

Two studies investigated whether language-specific patterns encoding manner and direction of motion in English and Greek affect adult and child speakers' performance on nonlinguistic motion tasks and linguistic descriptions of these motion events. Although the two linguistic groups differed in linguistic preferences, nonlinguistic task performance…

Three experiments explored change toward more flexible reliance on combinations of spatial and nonspatial landmark information to reorient oneself. Identified 5-7 years as age for this developmental change. Results suggest that language production skills play a causal role in allowing humans to construct novel representations rapidly, which can…

Investigated the development of reorientation abilities in humans in contrast to other mammals. Findings support the domain specificity of human's core cognitive abilities, the conservation of cognitive abilities across related species and over the course of human development, and the developmental processes by which core abilities are extended to…

Sex differences in cognitive skills, grouped into motor, spatial and linguistic areas, are assessed in relation to current theories of cerebral lateralization. Few convincing sex differences exist, either overall, or in interactions with functional localization. Qualifying criteria include age, birth order, culture, sex of experimenter and sex…