Human attention can be guided by semantic information conveyed by individual objects in the environment. Over time, we learn to allocate attention resources towards stimuli that are behaviourally relevant to ongoing action, leading to attention capture by meaningful peripheral stimuli. A common example includes, while driving, stimuli that imply a…

This study reports the results of 4 experiments that addressed whether the domains of deictic time and number exert a cross-domain link. Such a link would be consistent with A Theory of Magnitude (i.e., ATOM). In contrast, no link between the two domains would support the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), which assumes that each domain is only…

It is a prevailing theoretical claim that path integration is the primary means of developing global spatial representations. However, this claim is at odds with reported difficulty to develop global spatial representations of a multiscale environment using path integration. The current study tested a new hypothesis that locally similar but…

This study examined functions of self-motion and visual cues in updating people's actual headings in multiscale spaces. In an immersive virtual environment, the participants learned objects' locations inside two misaligned rectangular rooms by locomoting within and between the rooms. In each testing trial, the participants locomoted to adopt an…

The processing of time activates a spatial left-to-right mental timeline, where past events are "located" to the left and future events to the right. If past and future words activate this mental timeline, then the processing of such words should interfere with hand movements that go in the opposite direction. To test this hypothesis, we…

This research examined how spatial ability, sex, and cognitive styles associate with self-directed multimedia resource use (study 1) and learning outcomes (study 2). In study 1, three learning resource options were offered: two unimodal (text-only and labelled-picture) and one multimodal (picture-with-narration). Findings revealed that lower…

Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…

The results of three meta-analyses show that the effectiveness of learning from animations, when compared to learning from static pictures, is rather limited. A recent re-analysis of one of these meta-analyses, however, supports that learning from animations is considerably more effective than learning from static pictures if the specifics of the…

Visual working memory (VWM) is traditionally assumed to be immune to proactive interference (PI). However, in a recent study (Endress & Potter, 2014), performance in a visual memory task was superior when all items were unique and hence interference from previous trials was impossible, compared to a standard condition in which a limited set of…

Mounting evidence suggests that monetary reward induces an incidentally learned selection bias toward highly rewarded features. It remains controversial, however, whether learning of reward regularities has similar effects on spatial attention. Here we ask whether spatial biases toward highly rewarded locations are learned implicitly, or are…

The present study was to explore whether dynamic visualizations enriched with visuospatial cues can optimize learners' cognitive processing of mechanical systems. The animated conditions and cueing patterns were the independent variables with an attempt to investigate their impacts on retention and transfer tests. Either dynamic or static…

We can incidentally learn regularities in a visual scene, and this kind of learning facilitates subsequent processing of similar scenes. One example of incidental learning is referred to as "contextual cueing," a phenomenon in which repetitive exposure to a particular spatial configuration facilitates visual search performance in the…

This research examined whether the informational advantage of an animation over a static picture (and over no visualizations as a control condition) can be compensated by presenting the information in the text that constitutes this informational advantage. In addition, it was investigated whether learners' spatial abilities acted as a compensator…

This pupillometry study examined the relationship between intelligence and creative cognition from the resource allocation perspective. It was hypothesized that, during a creative metaphor task, individuals with higher intelligence scores would have different resource allocation patterns than individuals with lower intelligence scores. The study…

Behavioral studies have reported interactions between number processing and spatial attention, suggesting that number processing involves shifting attention along a mental continuum on which numbers are represented in ascending order. However, direct evidence for attention shifts remains scarce, the respective contribution of the horizontal and…