Expressing Left-Right relations is challenging for speaking-children. Yet, this challenge was absent for signing-children, possibly due to iconicity in the visual-spatial modality of expression. We investigate whether there is also a modality advantage when speaking-children's co-speech gestures are considered. Eight-year-old child and adult…

There are contentious and persistent gender differences reported in some measures of spatial skills, particularly mental rotation and, to a lesser extent, perspective-taking, which may have an impact on mathematics success. Furthermore, pathways between spatial skills and mathematics may be mediated by other cognitive factors, such as fluid…

Mental rotation, the cognitive process of moving an object in mind to predict how it looks in a new orientation, is coupled to intelligence, learning, and educational achievement. On average, adolescent and adult males solve mental rotation tasks slightly better (i.e., faster and/or more accurate) than females. When such behavioral differences…

Histone acetylation, catalyzed by e, has emerged as a promising therapeutic strategy in Alzheimer's disease (AD). By longitudinally characterizing spatial memory at 3, 6, and 9 mo of age, we show that acute activation and inhibition of the histone acetyltransferase PCAF remediated memory impairments in 3xTG-AD mice in an age-related bidirectional…

Spatial skills are critical for learning in STEM areas and are affected by spatial anxiety and working memory. Prior work also showed that there are interaction effects between spatial anxiety and verbal working memory (WM) on spatial skills, such that the negative relation between spatial anxiety and spatial skills is stronger among higher- than…

Previous studies have identified patterns of coordinated control when adults combine gait and grasping. What remains unclear is whether the coordination of these two tasks differs between adolescent and adult groups. Groups of adults and adolescents were asked to walk across an instrumented gait mat in three conditions: walk forward, walk and…

Children's spatial activities and parental spatial talk were measured to examine their associations with variability in preschoolers' spatial skills (N = 113, Mage = 4 years, 4 months; 51% female; 80% White, 11% Black, and 9% other). Parents who reported more diversity in daily spatial activities and used longer spatial talk utterances during a…

Purpose: Knowing target location can improve adults' speech-in-speech recognition in complex auditory environments, but it is unknown whether young children listen selectively in space. This study evaluated masked word recognition with and without a pretrial cue to location to characterize the influence of listener age and masker type on the…

The perception and manipulation of spatial information are essential for mathematical learning, and research highlights gender differences in spatial abilities. The present study contributes to the question of whether these differences are evident at earlier ages and how they interact with task complexity in mental rotation. We developed the…

Ninety-seven children aged 4-11 (49 males, 48 females, mostly White) were given the opportunity to improve their problem-solving performance by devising and implementing a novel cognitive offloading strategy. Across two phases, they searched for hidden rewards using maps that were either aligned or misaligned with the search space. In the second…

Evidence for associations between spatial skills and mathematics has led to the argument that spatial visualization plays a role in mathematical calculation. However, there is no single accepted definition of what spatial visualization encompasses. Here, we investigated spatial visualization in the context of a mental imagery framework. We applied…

Humans use space as a lens to navigate and make sense of the world, thus successfully applying spatial concepts is an important life skill. Spatial thinking and developing spatial concepts are core components of school Geography curricula. Teachers teach geographical skills systematically aligning to the curriculum; however, students can struggle…

In the adult brain, biases in the allocation of spatial attention can be measured using a line bisection task and are directly relatable to neural attention signals in the fronto-parietal attention network. Behavioral studies on the development of spatial biases have yielded a host of inconsistent results, likely due to variance in sample size,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to characterize spatial hearing abilities of children with longstanding unilateral hearing loss (UHL). UHL was expected to negatively impact children's sound source localization and masked speech recognition, particularly when the target and masker were separated in space. Spatial release from masking (SRM)…

With the rapid development of virtual technologies, there is a growing body of literature investigating the impact of virtual technologies on students' spatial ability. However, it remains unclear whether virtual technologies can effectively improve students' spatial ability. Therefore, this meta-analysis was conducted to synthesize the findings…