We investigated mental rotation in children by systematically varying the adult cube aggregate's set size, rotation angle, and picture/depth plane rotations in a new test. Eighty 4- to 11-year-old mainly middle-class children (British Indian and British African majority and white minority; 40 girls and 40 boys) were assessed using the new…

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…

Open math problem solving is critical to help students deepen the understanding and promote transfer of mathematics knowledge. However, the cognitive mechanism for open math problem solving, particularly the role of spatial abilities, has not been paid enough attention. This study recruited 192 junior middle school students (14.30 ± 0.48 years…

Some cognitive abilities exhibit reliable gender differences, with females outperforming males in specific aspects of verbal ability, and males showing an advantage on certain spatial tasks. Among these cognitive gender differences, differences in mental rotation are the most robust, and appear to be present even in infants. A large body of animal…

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…

There is an emerging consensus that spatial thinking is fundamental to later success in math and science. The goals of this study were to design and evaluate a novel test of three-dimensional (3D) mental rotation for 4- to 8-year-old children (N?=?165) that uses tangible 3D objects. Results revealed that the measure was both valid and reliable and…

The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the…

Normative adult age-related decrements are well documented for many diverse forms of effortful cognitive processing. However, it is currently unclear whether each of these decrements reflects a distinct and independent developmental phenomenon, or, in part, a more global phenomenon. A number of studies have recently been published that show…

Recent research has demonstrated that spatial memory in young and elderly adults depends upon the context in which items to be remembered are placed. Contexts in which cues to location are distinctive and heterogeneous have been found to be associated with better object location memory for both age groups. In this study, the relative contributions…

Attempts to identify specific components of a complex associative task, foreign language vocabulary learning, that might be particularly sensitive to developmental differences in imagery generation ability. Subjects were 95 second grade children enrolled in four schools and 90 sixth grade children enrolled in two of these same schools. (Author/MP)

To test the comparative efficacy of a visual imagery associative learning strategy in younger and older children, second and sixth grade children were presented a list of paired associates (concrete nouns) either at a faster or slower rate, under either an instruction to generate an interactive image for the pairs or a no strategy, control…

Compared verbal and visual encoding using the picture superiority effect. One experiment found an interaction between age and type of material. In other experiments, the picture superiority effect was found in both age groups with no interaction. Performing a semantic-orienting task had no effect on recall. (Author/RC)

Prior research has shown that adults generally remember pictorial stimuli better than printed words. The present study was designed to determine whether memory for these two visual modes might be differentially affected by age. These results indicate that memory processes in the elderly differ quantitatively and not qualitatively. (Author)

Three experiments compared congenitally blind and sighted adults and children on paired-associate, free-recall, and imaging tasks presumed to involve visual imagery in memory. In all three, blind subjects' performances were remarkably similar to the sighted. Results challenge previous explanations of performance such as Paivio's (1971). (Author/RD)

The relation of visual process to Piaget's stages of cognitive development was examined. The study utilized four age groups to correspond roughly to acquisition and consolidation periods of concrete and formal operations: 6 years - acquisition of concrete operations; 9 years - consolidation of concrete operations; 11 years - acquisition of formal…