Spatial construction--the activity of creating novel spatial arrangements or copying existing ones--is a hallmark of human spatial cognition. Spatial construction abilities predict math and other academic outcomes and are regularly used in IQ testing, but we know little about the cognitive processes that underlie them. In part, this lack of…

Recent studies on the spatial positional associated response codes (SPoARC) effect have shown that when Western adults are asked to keep in mind sequences of verbal items, they mentally spatialize them along the horizontal axis, with the initial items being associated with the left and the last items being associated with the right. The origin of…

Recent research in numerical cognition has begun to systematically detail the ability of humans and nonhuman animals to perceive the magnitudes of nonsymbolic ratios. These relationally defined analogs to rational numbers offer new potential insights into the nature of human numerical processing. However, research into their similarities with and…

This study examines the spontaneous use of embodied egocentric transformation (EET) in understanding false beliefs in the minds of others. EET involves the participants mentally transforming or rotating themselves into the orientation of an agent when trying to adopt his or her visuospatial perspective. We argue that psychological perspective…

The "temporal-focus hypothesis" claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space-time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the…

Being able to estimate quantity is important in everyday life and for success in the STEM disciplines. However, people have difficulty reasoning about magnitudes outside of human perception (e.g., nanoseconds, geologic time). This study examines patterns of estimation errors across temporal and spatial magnitudes at large scales. We evaluated the…

Language is a collaborative act: To communicate successfully, speakers must generate utterances that are not only semantically valid but also sensitive to the knowledge state of the listener. Such sensitivity could reflect the use of an "embedded listener model," where speakers choose utterances on the basis of an internal model of the…

This article presents research into human mental spatial reasoning with orientation knowledge. In particular, we look at reasoning problems about cardinal directions that possess multiple valid solutions (i.e., are spatially underdetermined), at human preferences for some of these solutions, and at representational and procedural factors that lead…

Typical spatial descriptions, such as "The car is in front of the house," describe the position of a located object (LO; e.g., the car) in space relative to a reference object (RO) whose location is known (e.g., the house). The orientation of the RO affects spatial language comprehension via the reference frame selection process.…

This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time--for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about…

The ability to imagine objects undergoing rotation (mental rotation) improves markedly with practice, but an explanation of this plasticity remains controversial. Some researchers propose that practice speeds up the rate of a general-purpose rotation algorithm. Others maintain that performance improvements arise through the adoption of a new…

Semantic studies on diagrammatic notations (Barwise & Etchemendy,; Shimojima,; Stenning & Lemon, ) have revealed that the "non-deductive," "emergent," or "perceptual" effects of diagrams (Chandrasekaran, Kurup, Banerjee, Josephson, & Winkler,; Kulpa,; Larkin & Simon,; Lindsay, ) are all rooted in the…

Automatic imitation or "imitative compatibility" is thought to be mediated by the mirror neuron system and to be a laboratory model of the motor mimicry that occurs spontaneously in naturalistic social interaction. Imitative compatibility and spatial compatibility effects are known to depend on different stimulus dimensions--body…

This study examined how different components of working memory are involved in the acquisition of egocentric and allocentric survey knowledge by people with a good and poor sense of direction (SOD). We employed a dual-task method and asked participants to learn routes from videos with verbal, visual, and spatial interference tasks and without any…

A theory of how concept formation begins is presented that accounts for conceptual activity in the first year of life, shows how increasing conceptual complexity comes about, and predicts the order in which new types of information accrue to the conceptual system. In a compromise between nativist and empiricist views, it offers a single…