Metacognitive monitoring, recognizing when one is accurate or not, is important because judgments of one's performance or knowledge often relate to control decisions, such as help seeking. Unfortunately, children and adults struggle to accurately monitor their performance during number-magnitude estimation. People's accuracy in estimating number…

When learning an environment from virtual navigation people gain knowledge about landmarks, their locations, and the paths that connect them. The present study newly aimed to investigate all these domains of knowledge and how cognitive factors such as visuospatial abilities and wayfinding inclinations might support virtual passive navigation. A…

The present study examined whether scaling direction and perceptual modality affect children's spatial scaling. Children aged 6-8 years (N = 201) were assigned to a visual, visuo-haptic, and haptic condition in which they were presented with colourful, embossed graphics. In the haptic condition, they were asked to wear a blindfold during the test…

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…

Background: Spatial problem-solving is an essential skill for success in many engineering disciplines; thus, understanding the cognitive processes involved could help inform the design of training interventions for students trying to improve this skill. Prior research has yet to investigate the differences in cognitive processes between spatial…

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)…

Mental rotation, a crucial aspect of spatial cognition, can be improved through repeated practice. However, the long-term effects of combining training with non-invasive brain stimulation and its neurophysiological correlates are not well understood. This study examined the lasting effects of a 10-day mental rotation training with high-definition…

The study aims to define the processes of pre-service mathematics teachers in reaching spatial visualisation generalisations within the context of drawing surface nets of solids. Two theories, Polya's problem-solving steps and novice-to-expert problem-solving schemas, were used as reference frameworks to describe the participants' spatial…

Many students persistently misinterpret histograms. This calls for closer inspection of students' strategies when interpreting histograms and case-value plots (which look similar but are different). Using students' gaze data, we ask: "How and how well do upper secondary pre-university school students estimate and compare arithmetic means of…

Spatial navigation is a fundamental cognitive function essential for daily life. Navigation skill assessment predominantly relies on self-reports, with varying accounts regarding their validity. The current study aimed to determine whether performance on an objective visual scene memory recognition ability task could serve as a valid predictor of…

The relation between episodic and semantic memory was examined by testing how semantic knowledge influences children's episodic memory for events and their locations. Five-, six-, and seven-year-olds (N = 87) engaged in events in a children's museum designed as a town. Events were semantically congruent or incongruent with the spatial location…

In light of the known visuoperceptual strengths and altered language skills in autism, we investigated the impact of problem content (semantic/visuospatial) combined with complexity and presence of lures on fluid reasoning in 43 autistic and 41 typical children (6-13 years old). Increased complexity and presence of lures diminished performance,…

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…

Children's arithmetic performance is dependent on the arithmetic task format, but little is known about how domain-specific and domain-general abilities contribute to solving diverse arithmetic problems. In this study, 145 Italian typically developing children between the ages of five and six, who have not yet received formal schooling, were…

Previous research has investigated the Spatial Numerical Associations of Response Codes (SNARC) effect as a measure of spatial number coding in relation to mathematics (Cipora et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14355). An issue that arises if one wants to correlate mathematical performance with the SNARC effect, is how individual…