Sources of individual differences in scientific problem solving were investigated. Participants representing a wide range of experience in geology completed tests of visuospatial ability and geological knowledge, and performed a geological bedrock mapping task, in which they attempted to infer the geological structure of an area in the Tobacco…

Co-thought gestures are hand movements produced in silent, noncommunicative, problem-solving situations. In the study, we investigated whether and how such gestures enhance performance in spatial visualization tasks such as a mental rotation task and a paper folding task. We found that participants gestured more often when they had difficulties…

Although traditional methods to collect similarity data (for multidimensional scaling [MDS]) are robust, they share a key shortcoming. Specifically, the possible pairwise comparisons in any set of objects grow rapidly as a function of set size. This leads to lengthy experimental protocols, or procedures that involve scaling stimulus subsets. We…

This study investigated the motor strategy involved in mental rotation tasks by examining 2 types of spontaneous gestures (hand-object interaction gestures, representing the agentive hand action on an object, vs. object-movement gestures, representing the movement of an object by itself) and different types of verbal descriptions of rotation.…

Four experiments compared three alternative models of linear syllogistic reasoning: (1) linguistic; (2) spatial; and (3) mixed linguistic-spatial. The mixed model, indicating the importance of both verbal and spatial ability, was supported by all four experiments, and for about three-fourths of the undergraduate students studied. (Author/GDC)