Theories of cognitive development must address both the issue of how children bring their knowledge to bear on behavior in-the-moment, and how knowledge changes over time. We argue that seeking answers to these questions requires an appreciation of the dynamic nature of the developing system in its full, reciprocal complexity. We illustrate this…

Primary somatosensory maps in the brain represent the body as a discontinuous, fragmented set of two-dimensional (2-D) skin regions. We nevertheless experience our body as a coherent three-dimensional (3-D) volumetric object. The links between these different aspects of body representation, however, remain poorly understood. Perceiving the body's…

Spatial cognition is a branch of cognitive psychology that studies how people acquire and use knowledge about their environment to determine where they are, how to obtain resources, and how to find their way home. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including neuroscience, cognition, and sociology, have discovered a great deal about how…

This discussion shows that a dynamic model for stimulus generalization based on an elementary diffusion process can reproduce the qualitative properties of spatial orientation in animals, including behavior in mazes. The model provides a behavioristic "reader" for the cognitive maps proposed by E. Tolman (1932). (SLD)

While it is often assumed that a single mechanism underlies varied experimental evidences of selectivity, Berlyne (1969) suggested that attention-like selectivity may take place in a number of quite separate neural systems. This study examined the issue of visuospatial attention by investigating covert orientation or "looking out of the corner of…

Ten sighted adults were blindfolded and asked to find four objects in the open space of a room. A perimeter pattern, a gridlike search pattern, and a reference-point strategy were variably effective, indicating that different kinds of experience may result in different kinds of knowledge that are optimal for different spatial judgment tasks.…

Second- and fourth-grade children viewed a cylindrical object in nine positions and identified the 90- , 180- , or 270-degree positions from a set of photographs. Perspectives in which the object differed from the child's view in both left-right and near-far dimensions were more difficult than perspectives that only transformed one dimension.…

Twelve orienteers and four military scouts each described a critical incident requiring navigation skills in off-road terrain. Interview analysis generated a taxonomy of the navigator's cognitive model encompassing perception and use of environmental cues, problem-solving and decision-making strategies, and skill level. Contains 38 references. (SV)