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…

Although the link between developmental dyslexia and visual-spatial deficit has been recurrently highlighted, the relationship between visual-spatial abilities and reading performance is still a controversial issue, considering the orthographic variability of the language being learned. This study aimed to examine whether visuo-spatial abilities…

Children and adult learners benefit from viewing hand gestures at instruction across domains (Cook, Duffy, & Fenn, 2013; Huang, Kim, & Christianson, 2019; Ping & Goldin-Meadow, 2008). Within the domain of mathematical learning, gesture at instruction has been shown to benefit children and adults in laboratory and classroom settings…

The purpose of the study is to examine the role of spatial ability and attention shifting in reading of illustrated science texts. Thirty-five fourth/fifth elementary students read two science texts. Prior knowledge and retention/transfer learning outcomes were measured using researcher-developed measures. While reading, students' eye movements…

Spatial skills have been consistently linked to mathematics achievement in older students and adults, but we know little about their relationship to mathematics achievement in elementary school. This study examined how spatial skills influenced the development of number sense, and subsequent mathematics competency, as students progressed from the…

The entorhinal-hippocampal circuit is one of the earliest sites of cortical pathology in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Visuospatial memory paradigms that are mediated by the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit may offer a means to detect memory impairment during the early stages of AD. In this study, we developed a 4-min visuospatial memory paradigm called…

Events consist of diverse elements, each processed in specialized neocortical networks, with temporal lobe memory systems binding these elements to form coherent event memories. We provide a novel theoretical analysis of an unexplored consequence of the independence of memory systems for elements and their bindings, 1 that raises the paradoxical…

A novel battery (BAFE; Valeri et al. 2015) was used in order to assess three executive function (EF) abilities (working memory, inhibition and shifting) in a sample of 27 intellectually able preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared with 27 typically developing children matched on age and nonverbal IQ. Differences in EF skills were…

A story's space or setting often determines and constrains the actions of its characters. We report on an experiment with 106 children of 7-8 years old in which, using a novel enactment task, we measured children's representation of a story character's movement during story listening. We found that children were more likely to enact movements that…

Through five waves of data collection, this longitudinal study investigated the development of spatial skills in 304 elementary school children (M[subscript age] = 7.64 years) as they progressed from the second to fourth grade. The study focused on whether multiple latent classes with different developmental profiles best explain development.…

Perceiving not just values, but relations between values, is critical to human cognition. We tested the predictions of a proposed mechanism for processing categorical spatial relations between two objects--the "shift account" of relation processing--which states that relations such as "above" or "below" are extracted…

Part-set cuing "inhibition" refers to the counterintuitive finding that hints--specifically, part of the set of to-be-remembered information--often impair memory performance in free recall tasks. Although inhibition is the most commonly reported result, part-set cuing "facilitation" has been shown with serial order tasks. The…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

The purpose of this study is to investigate and conceptualize the ranks of importance of social cognitive variables on university students' computer programming performances. Spatial ability, working memory, self-efficacy, gender, prior knowledge and the universities students attend were taken as variables to be analyzed. The study has been…

The aim of this study was to analyse the role of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory (WM) and language skills (vocabulary, listening comprehension) in predicting preschool and kindergarten-aged children's ability to solve mathematical word problems presented orally. The participants were 116 Finnish-speaking children aged 4-7?years. The…