Current evidence provides support for the idea that time is mentally represented by spatial means, i.e., a left-right mental timeline. However, available studies have tested only factual events, i.e., those which have occurred in the past or can be predicted to occur in the future. In the present study we tested whether past and future potential…

Cognitive mapping is assumed to be through hippocampus-dependent place learning rather than striatum-dependent response learning. However, we proposed that either type of spatial learning, as long as it involves encoding metric relations between locations and reference points, could lead to a cognitive map. Furthermore, the fewer reference points…

The paper-and-pencil Mental Rotation Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) consistently produces large sex differences favoring men (Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995). In this task, participants select 2 of 4 answer choices that are rotations of a probe stimulus. Incorrect choices (i.e., foils) are either mirror reflections of the probe or…

Working memory, the system allowing for a simultaneous maintenance and processing of information, is typically conceived as a capacity limited system. A proposed method to transcend its standard maintenance capacity is to maintain multifeature objects, instead of isolated features. Several studies have shown that multifeature memory items are…

Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…

Although relational reasoning has been described as a process at the heart of human cognition, the exact character of relational representations remains an open debate. Symbolic-connectionist models of relational cognition suggest that relations are structured representations, but that they are ultimately grounded in feature sets; thus, they…

In this study, we examined the accuracy and dynamics of visually guided saccades in 20 adults with autism spectrum disorder, as compared to 20 typically developed adults using the Step/Overlap/Gap paradigms. Performances in participants with autistic spectrum disorder were characterized by preserved Gap/Overlap effect, but reduced gain and peak…

This study investigates the role of perspective-taking skills in how children explain spatially complex astronomical phenomena. Explaining many astronomical phenomena, especially those studied in elementary and middle school, requires shifting between an Earth-based description of the phenomena and a space-based reference frame. We studied 7- to…

The present article describes two studies that examine the impact of teaching students to use gesture to support spatial thinking in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) discipline of chemistry. In Study 1 we compared the effectiveness of instruction that involved either watching gesture, reproducing gesture, or reading…

A major debate in the mental-rotation literature concerns the question of whether objects are represented holistically during rotation. Effects of object complexity on rotational speed are considered strong evidence against such holistic representations. In Experiment 1, such an effect of object complexity was markedly present. A closer look on…

Many studies have examined how people recall the locations of objects in spatial layouts. However, little is known about how people monitor the accuracy of judgments based on those memories. The goal of the present experiments was to examine the effect of reference frame characteristics on metacognitive accuracy for spatial judgments. Reference…

In the number-to-position task, with increasing age and numerical expertise, children's pattern of estimates shifts from a biased (nonlinear) to a formal (linear) mapping. This widely replicated finding concerns symbolic numbers, whereas less is known about other types of quantity estimation. In Experiment 1, Preschool, Grade 1, and Grade 3…

The article tests the assumption that forgetting in working memory for verbal materials is caused by time-based decay, using the complex-span paradigm. Participants encoded 6 letters for serial recall; each letter was preceded and followed by a processing period comprising 4 trials of difficult visual search. Processing duration, during which…

This article presents a reanalysis of the data of 862 second and fourth graders collected in two previous studies, focusing on the influence of method (psychometric vs. chronometric) and stimulus type on the gender difference in mental-rotation accuracy. The children had to solve mental-rotation tasks with animal pictures, letters, or cube…

Theory suggests that the vision-for-perception and vision-for-action processing streams operate under very different temporal constraints (Glover, 2004; Goodale, Jackobson, & Keillor, 1994; Graham, Bradshaw, & Davis, 1998; Hu, Eagleson, & Goodale, 1999). With the present study, children and young adults were asked to estimate how far a cued target…