Background: Developmental research provides considerable evidence of a strong relationship between verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) and mathematics ability across age groups. However, little is known about how components of WM (i.e., short-term storage, processing speed, the central executive) might relate to mathematics sub-categories…

Spatial language and ability play important roles in children's cognitive development. Spatial ability in kindergarten predicts achievement in reading, math, science, and technology in primary school and therefore constitutes an important skill set in preparation for school entrance. Good spatial thinking skills are required for learning in…

School readiness is recognized as one of the key starting points for children's further success in their school work and in their subsequent career. However, many kindergarten teachers still miss and long for a comprehensive, reliable and standardized diagnostic tool which could help them recognize the level of children's school readiness. That is…

Cognitive tasks are seldom evaluated on their ability to provide valid and reliable measurements of the construct they intend to measure. This scarcity of psychometric evaluations makes it challenging to evaluate replications of experimental effects and to relate performance in cognitive tasks to other constructs of interest. In developmental…

A good deal of research purports that bilingualism has a positive effect on some aspects of cognitive functioning. However, this effect is not consistent, and little research examines trajectories of cognitive skill development in bilingual children. Moreover, it remains unclear whether different types of bilingualism impact how cognitive…

The presented study focuses on children aged from 5 to 6.5 who attend Czech kindergartens. Its purpose is to explore a potential positive impact of an educational game application on malleability of children's spatial skills through the application usage. The research was conducted as a pedagogical experiment in which the pre-test and post-test…

The present study longitudinally investigated proportional reasoning abilities in early elementary school before the start of its instruction. Three aims were put forward: (a) distinguishing the different developmental states in young children's understanding of missing-value proportional situations, (b) investigating how children transition…

Although we cannot see or touch time, across many cultures, we use spatial representations to think about this abstract concept. Spatial representations of time are thought to support temporal concepts that might otherwise be difficult to represent and reason about, such as the temporal component of episodic memory. One common form of spatially…

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…

By the end of primary school, children are expected to acquire a range of mathematical skills that progressively develop. This study aimed to gain insight into how a large number of numerical and geometrical measures are grouped and whether the structures shift or remain invariant along child's development based on the data obtained from a sample…

The neural representation of visual-spatial functions has traditionally been ascribed to the right hemisphere, but little is known about these representations in children, including whether and how lateralization of function changes over the course of development. Some studies suggest bilateral activation early in life that develops toward…

Spatial ability is a significant component of mathematical ability and a foundation for children to master mathematical knowledge. Although many studies have confirmed that technology can enhance children's learning, few have explored the use of technology in the area of children's spatial learning. In this study, we adopted a paradigm for…

The aim of the study is to determine the movement skills, geometry and spatial perceptions of five-year-old children. The study group consisted of 222 children, 110 girls and 112 boys, who received preschool education in the spring semester of the 2021-2022 academic year in Istanbul, Türkiye. The correlational survey model, one of the quantitative…

Inuit communities in Northern Quebec (Canada) are exposed to environmental contaminants, particularly to mercury, lead and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Previous studies reported adverse associations between these neurotoxicants and memory performance. Here we aimed to determine the associations of pre- and postnatal exposures to mercury, lead…

Background: Spontaneous upper extremity movements in infancy provide insight on neuromotor development. Spatiotemporal kinematics have been used to evaluate typical development of reaching, a foundational motor skill in infancy. This study evaluates the relationship between spontaneous upper extremity movements, not elicited by a toy, and motor…