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 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…

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

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…

Background: Investigating the relationship between the human body and its spatial environment is a critical component in understanding the process of acquiring spatial knowledge. However, few empirical evaluations have looked at how the visual accessibility of an environment affects spatial learning. To address this gap, this paper focuses on…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

The present research studied the role of the non-executive and executive components of working memory in the detection of phonological, orthographical, and grammatical spelling errors. Before performing error detection tasks, undergraduate participants completed a battery of tasks to evaluate their non-executive (verbal and visuospatial storage)…

Adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) performed two priming experiments in which they implicitly processed a prime stimulus, containing high and/or low spatial frequency information, and then explicitly categorized a target face either as male/female (gender task) or as positive/negative (Valence task). Adolescents with ASD…

While most typically developing (TD) participants have a coarse-to-fine processing style, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to be less globally and more locally biased when processing visual information. The stimulus-specific spatial frequency content might be directly relevant to determine this temporal hierarchy of visual…

First-year architecture students are expected to utilise visuospatial abilities to generate/construct, retain, rotate and manipulate space mentally and physically through physical and digital representations. This study of 57 female and 23 male participants was conducted to investigate first-year architecture students' visuospatial abilities by…

In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response…

This study aims to test how an intervention based on virtual reality (VR) may enhance visuospatial skills amongst people with disability. A quasi-experimental intra-group study was therefore conducted. Participants were 20 people with severe disability (65% males; 34.35 years, on average, and 84.95% of disability rate according to the Andalusian…

Three experiments investigated whether navigation is less efficient across boundaries than within boundaries. In an immersive virtual environment, participants learned objects' locations in a large room or a small room. Participants then pointed to the objects' original locations after physically walking a circuitous path without vision.…

Little empirical data are available concerning the cognitive abilities of gifted individuals in general and especially those who excel in mathematics. We examined visual processing abilities distinguishing between general giftedness (G) and excellence in mathematics (EM). The research population consisted of 190 students from four groups of 10th-…