Background: Realistic visualizations have been associated with benefits in retention performance, but also with disadvantages in transfer tasks. Realistic details are considered to be helpful for the initial learning of content, but not for the generalization to other domains and tasks. Objectives: The contradictory nature of previous evidence…

Previous research has demonstrated that cognitive offloading (i.e., externalizing mental processes) is useful for immediate problem solving. However, long-term effects of cognitive offloading on subsequent problem solving without offloading are remarkably understudied. Our main goal was to investigate the effects of representation control (i.e.,…

Humans have a uniquely sophisticated ability to see past superficial features and to understand the relational structure of the world around us. This ability often requires that we compare structures, finding commonalities and differences across visual depictions that are arranged in space, such as maps, graphs, or diagrams. Although such visual…

This study compares the experts and the novices to investigate their information processing in dealing with the different degrees of recognition of shape-match stimulus by measuring the event-related potentials (ERPs). ERPs were recorded while 20 designers and 20 novices made shape-match judgments for table and chair sets. All of the tables were…

Awareness of one's own strengths and weaknesses during visualisation is often initiated by the imagination -- the faculty for intuitively visualising and modelling an object. Towards exploring the role of metacognitive awareness and imagination in facilitating visualisation in solving a mathematics task, four secondary schools in the North West…

The increasing availability of self-monitoring technologies has created opportunities for gaining ­awareness about one's own behavior and reflecting on it. In teaching and learning, there is interest in using ­self-monitoring technologies, but very few studies have explored the possibilities. In this paper, we present a design study that…

Assessment is an important aspect of medical education because it tests students' competence and motivates them to study. Various assessment methods, with and without images, are used in the study of anatomy. In this study, we investigated the use of extended matching questions (EMQs). To gain insight into the influence of images on the…

Communities, also called clusters or modules, are groups of nodes which probably share common properties and/or play similar roles within a graph. They widely exist in real networks such as biological, social, and information networks. Allowing users to interactively browse and explore the community structure, which is essential for understanding…

This article investigates whether different formats of visualizing information result in different mental models constructed in learning from pictures, whether the different mental models lead to different patterns of performance in subsequently presented tasks, and how these visualization effects can be modified by further external…

The present study investigates the relation between spatial ability and visuo-spatial and verbal working memory in spatial text processing. In two experiments, participants listened to a spatial text (Experiments 1 and 2) and a non-spatial text (Experiment 1), at the same time performing a spatial or a verbal concurrent task, or no secondary task.…

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and…

The purpose of the present study is twofold: the first objective is to evaluate the importance of visual experience for the ability to form a spatial representation (spatial mental model) of fairly elaborate spatial descriptions. Secondly, we examine whether blind people exhibit the same preferences (i.e. level of performance on spatial tasks) as…

This article reviews recent empirical investigations of imagination or mental practice in highly cognitive, realistic educational domains such as mathematics or learning computer applications. While mental practice has been a standard tool in training schedules devised by sports psychologists for several decades, with its efficacy studied…

Current issues in educational communications and technology are addressed in this collection of 35 papers, in which research reports predominate. Topics discussed include factors related to the learner, e.g., field dependence/independence, reading ability, learning strategies, and cognitive style. Presentation format and media and stimulus…