In design education, immersive virtual reality (VR) has grown as a visualization and interaction tool. Nonetheless, little research has been done on how individuals self-perception within VR affects their performance. This self-awareness is carried out using avatars that depict the virtual body through multiple points of view. This article…

Over the past decade, geospatial technologies have emerged as a tool for developing spatial reasoning and cognitive processes. While the foundational Learning to Think Spatially report from the National Research Center (2006) launched research into the use of geospatial technologies in isolation, more recently, cloud-based simulation software have…

Working Memory (WM) is an essential concept of cognitive science since many aspects of human learning depend on it. Primarily proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) and developed by Baddeley (1986), the concept of WM comprises the number of subsystems involved during the process and the considerable emphasis on its key role in cognitive tasks such…

Mental rotation (MR) is the ability to transform a mental representation of an object so as to accurately predict how the object would look from a different angle (Sci 171:701-703, 1971), and it is involved in a number of important cognitive and behavioral activities. In this review we discuss recent studies that have examined MR in infants and…

Students with poor spatial abilities experience a barrier to academic success early in the STEM curriculum. However, Sorby et al. report that even brief training can improve spatial reasoning in students who lack them. Further, the National Research Council recommends that spatial thinking skills be taught at all educational levels. Halpern…

Given the role of education in shaping social ideology, there is value in considering how learning spaces affect students' perceptions of inclusivity and social justice. This paper posits that ability as a central focus in education can intersect with marginalization arising from race, gender, class, and indigeneity, towards potential…

Post-learning sleep is beneficial for human memory. However, it may be that not all memories benefit equally from sleep. Here, we manipulated a spatial learning task using monetary reward and performance feedback, asking whether enhancing the salience of the task would augment overnight memory consolidation and alter its incorporation into…

In the lesson on which this practical article is based, third grade students constructed a "lift-the-flap" page to explore food webs on the prairie. The moveable papercraft focused student attention on prairie animals' external structures and how the inferred functions of those structures could support further inferences about the…

An extraordinary variety of experimental (e.g., flicker, magnetic fields) and clinical (epilepsy, migraine) conditions give rise to a surprisingly common set of elementary hallucinations, including spots, geometric patterns, and jagged lines, some of which also have color, depth, motion, and texture. Many of these simple hallucinations fall into a…

A growing number of studies claim that spatial attention can be split "on demand" into several, segregated foci of enhanced processing. Intrigued by the theoretical ramifications of this proposal, we analyzed 19 relevant sets of experiments using four methodological criteria. We typically found several methodological limitations in each study that…

The Woodcock-Johnson-Fourth edition (WJ IV; Schrank, McGrew, & Mather, 2014a) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth edition (WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014) are two of the major tests of cognitive abilities used in school psychology. The complete WJ IV battery includes the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (Schrank,…

Learning to reason spatially is increasingly recognized as an essential component of geometry education. Generally taken to be the "ability to represent, generate, transform, communicate, document, and reflect on visual information," "spatial reasoning" uses the spatial relationships between objects to form ideas. Spatial thinking takes a variety…

One measure of the impact of a new idea in geography education is how well it is incorporated into teachers' everyday practice. "Spatial thinking" is not really a new idea in geography education; spatial analysis has long been one of its core traditions, but the use of the term is novel and only beginning to be widely used. By spatial thinking the…

Effects of a spatial cue on representational momentum were examined. If a cue was present during or after target motion and indicated the location at which the target would vanish or had vanished, forward displacement of that target decreased. The decrease in forward displacement was larger when cues were present after target motion than when cues…

This article illustrates spatial thinking tasks through cube diagrams and drawings. The author talks about the pentacube diagram that is based on the principle that a vertical cube-edge is shown "vertically". The author describes how to extend isometric drawing to include triangular wedges that are made by slicing single cubes, bi-cubes,…