Although we cannot see or touch time, across many cultures, we use spatial representations to think about this abstract concept. Spatial representations of time are thought to support temporal concepts that might otherwise be difficult to represent and reason about, such as the temporal component of episodic memory. One common form of spatially…

Children's arithmetic performance is dependent on the arithmetic task format, but little is known about how domain-specific and domain-general abilities contribute to solving diverse arithmetic problems. In this study, 145 Italian typically developing children between the ages of five and six, who have not yet received formal schooling, were…

Urban and rural children have different levels of performance in arithmetic processing. This study investigated whether such a residence difference can be explained by phonological processing. A total of 1,501 Chinese primary school students from urban and rural areas were recruited to complete nine cognitive tasks: two in arithmetic performance…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

Similar estimation biases appear in a wide range of quantitative judgments, across many tasks and domains. Often, these biases (those that occur, for example, when adults or children indicate remembered locations of objects in bounded spaces) are believed to provide evidence of Bayesian or rational cognitive processing, and are explained in terms…

The metaphor of the mental number line accounts for numerous empirical effects of spatial-numerical associations. In the present study, we aimed at investigating directional spatial-numerical associations reflected by SNARC-like digit-direction and sign-direction congruency effects as well as the sign-digit compatibility effect when 6th graders…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

The development of math reasoning and 3-d mental rotation skills are intertwined. However, it is currently not understood how these cognitive processes develop and interact longitudinally at the within-person level -- either within or across genders. In this study, 553 students (52% girls) were assessed from fifth to seventh grades on 3-d mental…

Standard Australian reading assessment tests are criticized for being culturally inappropriate for use with Australian Indigenous children, particularly for those living in remote and very remote regions, as these tests are culturally biased towards mainstream Australian culture and imperceptive to Indigenous knowledge, language, concepts, and…

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by a complex maturation process of various cognitive abilities. Cognitive control, which includes response inhibition and working memory, is one of them. A typical study on response inhibition to visual stimuli presents distractors and targets on the same display (e.g., the computer screen).…

Over three decades of research has shown that spatial reasoning and mathematics performance are highly correlated. Spatial visualization, in particular, has been found to predict mathematics performance in primary and middle school children. This research sought to determine the effectiveness of a spatial visualization intervention program on…

The ability to recognize temporal patterns and position events in time emerges during the preschool years and is refined in middle childhood. This study explored individual differences in temporal cognition in relation to verbal and nonverbal abilities. Children (30 boys, 32 girls; M[subscript age] = 8;2, age range = 6;0-10;8) completed 3…

Previous studies provided evidence of a relationship between mental rotation (MR) and motor processes in children and adults. However, there is no direct evidence that MR ability is a reliable predictor of success for motor performance. After completion of a MR test, the motor performance of 7- to 8-year-old and 11- to 12-year-old children was…

We tested whether mental rotation training improved math performance in 6- to 8-year-olds. Children were pretested on a range of number and math skills. Then one group received a single session of mental rotation training using an object completion task that had previously improved spatial ability in children this age (Ehrlich, Levine, &…

We test whether comparison can promote learning of new relational abstractions. In Experiment 1, preschoolers heard labels for novel spatial patterns and were asked to extend the label to one of two alternatives: one sharing an object with the standard or one having the same relational pattern as the standard. Children strongly preferred the…