Spatial updating based on self-motion cues is important to navigation in the absence of familiar landmarks. Previous studies showed that spatial updating without vision was automatic. The goal of the current study was to investigate whether ambiguous orientations indicated by visual cues affect spatial updating based on self-motion. Participants…

We investigated the extents of automaticity in location and orientation encoding in visual working memory (VWM) by manipulating their task relevance and assessing the amount of resource recruited by their encoding. Across five experiments, participants were surprised with a location report trial (Experiment 1A, 2A, and 3) or an orientation report…

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…

Although beacon- and map-based spatial strategies are the default strategies for navigation activities, today's navigational aids mostly follow a beacon-based design where one is provided with turn-by-turn instructions. Recent research, however, shows that our reliance on these navigational aids is causing a decline in our spatial skills. We are…

Recent evidence for an evolved fear module in the brain comes from studies showing that adults, children and infants detect evolutionarily threatening stimuli such as snakes faster than non-threatening ones. A decisive argument for a threat detection system efficient early in life would come from data showing, in young infants, a functional…

In a direction-giving task, we examine whether a high-level constraint--the task partners' relative body alignment--influences spatial language use and task accuracy. In 32 pairs, task partners interacted in two conditions: for one route description, direction givers (DGs) and direction followers (DFs) sat side-by-side ("aligned"…

To better identify the distinctive characteristics of space representation in the radial dimension, we have proposed a new paradigm: the landmarks alignment task where two parallel aluminum bars were radially presented. Children had to move a landmark along one bar and place it at the same location as the reference landmark placed by the examiner…

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 in spatial reorientation, which only presented the target location in the corner, has found that adults weighed angles more than wall lengths. We proposed that in previous research, angular cues were available for direct use whereas length cues had to be associated with the left/right sense. We thus investigated whether the…

Two experiments investigated how people use buildings and street configurations to reorient in large-scale environments. In immersive virtual environments, participants learned objects' locations in an intersection consisting of 4 streets. The objects' locations were specified by 2 cues: a building and/or the street configuration. During the test,…

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

Movement perception facilitates spatial orienting of attention in infants (Farroni, Johnson, Brockbank, & Simion, 2000). In a series of 4 experiments, we investigated how orienting of attention in infancy is modulated by dynamic stimuli. Experiment 1 (N = 36) demonstrated that 5-month-olds as well as 7-month-olds orient to the direction of a…

In this paper, we focus on topological approaches to space and we argue that experiences with topology allow middle school students to develop a more robust understanding of orientation and dimension. We frame our argument in terms of the phenomenological literature on perception and corporeal space. We discuss findings from a quasi-experimental…

Tactile stimulus location is automatically transformed from somatotopic into external spatial coordinates, rendering information about the location of touch in three-dimensional space. This process is referred to as tactile remapping. Whereas remapping seems to occur automatically for the hands and feet, the fingers may constitute an exception in…

This study aims to assess whether the handling of concrete ball-and-stick molecular models promotes translation between diagrammatic representations and a concrete model (or vice versa) and the coordination of the different types of structural representations of a given molecular structure. Forty-one Algerian undergraduate students were requested…