Spatial memory is important for supporting the successful completion of everyday activities and is a particularly vulnerable domain in late life. Grouping items together in memory, or chunking, can improve spatial memory performance. In memory for desktop scale spaces and well-learned large-scale environments, error patterns suggest that…

The relation between perceptual and conceptual knowledge is a longstanding research question in developmental psychology. Here we tested children's dependence on figurative information with a reaction time/accuracy task. A sample of 151 children from 5 to 10 years were assessed from two multicultural and multiracial schools in the London (UK)…

Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical…

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…

Visual search is faster when a fixed target location is paired with a spatially invariant (vs. randomly changing) distractor configuration, thus indicating that repeated contexts are learned, thereby guiding attention to the target (contextual cueing [CC]). Evidence for memory-guided attention has also been revealed with electrophysiological…

People's expectations help them make judgments about the world. In the area of spatial memory, the interaction of existing knowledge with incoming information is best illustrated in the category effect, a bias in positioning a target toward the prototypical location of its region (Huttenlocher et al., 1991). According to Bayesian principles, these…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to explore the extent to which nonlinguistic cognitive factors demonstrate a relationship with aphasia treatment outcomes. To that end, we conducted a scoping review to broadly characterize the state of the literature related to this topic. Methods: Reporting guidelines from the PRISMA extension for scoping…

It is essential to recognize the strengths and talents of autistic individuals. Previous studies of extraordinary talents (i.e. skills that stand out relative to the general population) have combined individuals with different skills (e.g. calendrical calculation, drawing) into one group. There has been limited investigation of talents in specific…

Sleep facilitates the consolidation (i.e., enhancement) of simple, explicit (i.e., conscious) motor sequence learning (MSL). MSL can be dissociated into egocentric (i.e., motor) or allocentric (i.e., spatial) frames of reference. The consolidation of the allocentric memory representation is sleep-dependent, whereas the egocentric consolidation…

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of verbal and visuospatial memory in Chinese reading comprehension. One hundred twenty-eight Cantonese-speaking children participated in the study at the end of their 3rd year of kindergarten in Hong Kong. Both verbal and visuospatial memory were found to be significantly associated with…

In the real word, we perceive our environment as a series of static and dynamic views, with viewpoint transitions providing a natural link from one static view to the next. The current research examined if experiencing such transitions is fundamental to learning the spatial layout of small-scale displays. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a…

This paper examines second-language vocabulary memorization. The use of augmented reality (AR) under visuospatial bootstrapping (VSB), a novel approach developed from work on the cognitive psychology of working memory, was contrasted with an established application, Quizlet that has been extensively used in foreign-language teaching. The AR-VSB…

Purpose: Evidence exists that changes in language performance may be an early indicator of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), often a harbinger of dementing disease. The purpose of this study was the evaluation of language performance in individuals at risk for MCI by virtue of age and self-concern and its relation to performance on tests of memory,…

We explored the potential of a robotics application in education as a measurement tool of child executive functioning skills. Sixty-five kindergarteners received assignments to go through a maze with a programmable robot, the Bee-Bot. Via observation we quantified how they solved these tasks. Their performance was successfully aggregated into a…

The hippocampus has long been recognized as important for the formation of long-term memory. Recent work has suggested that the hippocampus might also be important for certain kinds of spatial operations, as in constructing scenes, shifting perspective, or perceiving the geometry of scenes and their boundaries. We explored this proposal using a…