Research with Western samples has uncovered the rapid development of infants' visual attention. This study evaluated spatial attention in 6- to 9-month-old infants living in rural Malawi (N = 511; n[subscript Boys] = 255, n[subscript Yao] = 427) or suburban California, United States (N = 57, n[subscript Boys] = 29, n[subscript White] = 37) in…

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

Spatial working memory (SWM) is the ability to encode, maintain, and retrieve spatial information over a temporal gap, and relies on a network of structures including the medial septum (MS), which provides critical input to the hippocampus. Although the role of the MS in SWM is well-established, up until recently, we have been unable to use…

There are mixed results regarding the differentiation of neurofunctional correlates of spatial abilities. Previous studies employed complex environments or alternate memory tasks which could potentially add to inconsistencies across studies of navigation. To help elucidate the existing mixed findings, we conducted a study in a simplistic…

Previous studies independently demonstrated impairments in rapid orienting/disengagement and zooming-out of spatial attention in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These attentional mechanisms, however, are not completely independent. Aiming at a more complete picture of spatial attention deficits in ASD, we examined the relationship between…

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left-to-right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is…

Do children spontaneously represent spatial-numeric features of a task, even when it does not include printed numbers (Mix et al., 2016)? Sixty first grade students completed a novel spatial estimation task by seeking and finding pages in a 100-page book without printed page numbers. Children were shown pages 1 through 6 and 100, and then were…

When speakers coordinate with one another, they have available a range of alternatives for conceptualizing and describing spatial relationships. To understand the features of successful communication in collaborative spatial tasks, it is important to identify factors that shape speakers' linguistic choices and evaluate them in relation to task…

The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has…

The move from additive to multiplicative thinking requires significant change in children's comprehension and manipulation of numerical relationships, involves various conceptual components, and can be a slow, multistage process for some. Unit arrays are a key visuospatial representation for supporting learning, but most research focuses on 2D…

Although relational reasoning has been described as a process at the heart of human cognition, the exact character of relational representations remains an open debate. Symbolic-connectionist models of relational cognition suggest that relations are structured representations, but that they are ultimately grounded in feature sets; thus, they…

Recently, a great deal of research has demonstrated that although everyday experience is continuous in nature, it is parsed into separate events. The aim of the present study was to examine whether event structure can influence the effectiveness of cognitive control. Across 5 experiments we varied the structure of events within the AX-CPT by…

When trained to locate a hidden platform in a T-maze moved between two positions, rats appear to adopt a conditional strategy based on start point discrimination. To determine if location cues or orientation cues at the start point underlie this discrimination, separate groups of rats were trained on two place problems, each with unique start…

An influential theory of spatial navigation states that the boundary shape of an environment is preferentially encoded over and above other spatial cues, such that it is impervious to interference from alternative sources of information. We explored this claim with 3 intradimensional--extradimensional shift experiments, designed to examine the…