Working memory is a hot topic in the field of cognitive neuroscience and has attracted the attention of many researchers in the field of education. In recent years, it has been found that the cognitive ability related to spatial information in working memory can positively affect STEM academic performance, which is highly important for educational…

"Purpose:" ASD is associated with relative strengths in the visuospatial domain but varying abilities in the linguistic domain. Previous studies suggest parallels between spatial language and spatial cognition in older autistic individuals, but no research to date has examined this relationship in young autistic children. Therefore, the…

People navigate in various types of spaces, including indoor and outdoor environments. These differ in availability of navigational cues, such as distal landmarks, clear boundaries, and regular grid structures. Does learning the layout of different types of environments rely on the same or diverse cognitive abilities? Do separate measures of…

Background: Children's numerical and arithmetic skills differ greatly already at an early age. Although research focusing on accounting for these large individual differences clearly demonstrates that mathematical performance draws upon several cognitive abilities, our knowledge concerning key abilities underlying mathematical skill development is…

Individual differences in spatial thinking are predictive of children's math and science achievement and later entry into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Little is known about whether parent characteristics predict individual differences in children's spatial thinking. This study aims to understand whether,…

People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have difficulties mentally simulating events, perhaps due to a difficulty mentally generating and maintaining a coherent spatial scene -- that is, 'scene construction'. The current study compared scene construction ability between autistic adults (N = 55) and age-, gender- and Intelligence…

Background: Spatial ability (SA) was shown to be important for success in different fields, including STEM. Recent research suggested that SA is a unitary construct, rather than a set of related skills. However, it is not clear how individual differences in different facets of SA emerge, and how they relate to variance in general cognitive…

In 1993, an increase was observed in the spatial IQ scores of the volunteers who listened to Mozart's sonata K448 for 10 min, and this phenomenon entered the literature as the "Mozart effect." Other studies have shown that this effect is particularly evident in spatial skill tests. A large body of research has provided evidence that…

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 present study aimed to examine whether Mandarin-speaking children on the autism spectrum showed differences in comprehending spatial demonstratives ("this" and "that", and "here" and "there"), as compared to typically developing (TD) children. Another aim of this study was to investigate the roles of…

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…

This study aimed to portray insightful problem solvers. Participants solved classic insight problems and rebuses and completed cognitive and creativity tasks. Grouping the participants based on their success in solving insight problems of different modalities revealed that 95% of the spatial problem solvers succeeded in solving verbal ones…

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 ability has long been regarded as important in STEM, and mental rotation, a subcategory of spatial ability, is widely accepted as the cognitive ability with the largest gender difference in favor of men. Multiple meta-analyses of various tests of spatial ability have found large gender differences in outcomes of the mental rotation test…

This research investigates how the kinesthetic body forms knowledge of an environment and how that knowledge transforms with the involvement of participants. A Practice as Research (PAR) methodology employs the body as primary agent in cognition. Choreographic and improvisational movement devices assist the task of tracing cognition in…