In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to "front" and "behind," followed by "left" and "right." This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by…

The cognitive processes involved in route retracing are not well known. This study aims to highlight them in an elderly population in which contradictory results have been obtained, certain studies showing specific difficulties for route retracing, others not. Thirty-nine elderly subjects performed a route-learning task (forward-backward) in a…

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1-5 years (N = 320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial…

Linguistic expressions of locative spatial relations in sign languages are mostly visually motivated representations of space involving mapping of entities and spatial relations between them onto the hands and the signing space. These are also morphologically complex forms. It is debated whether modality-specific aspects of spatial expressions…

Humans have a uniquely sophisticated ability to see past superficial features and to understand the relational structure of the world around us. This ability often requires that we compare structures, finding commonalities and differences across visual depictions that are arranged in space, such as maps, graphs, or diagrams. Although such visual…

The "temporal-focus hypothesis" claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space-time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the…

In the current study, we investigated the ways in which the acquisition and transfer of spatial knowledge were affected by (a) the type of spatial relations predominately experienced during learning (routes determined by walkways vs. straight-line paths between locations); (b) environmental complexity; and (c) the availability of rotational…

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…

Previous work has shown that children are able to make a spatial inference about adjacent locations that have only been experienced indirectly (Hazen, Lockman, & Pick, 1978). We sought to replicate this finding in rats, on a conceptually analogous task. In a first experiment, rats (n = 8) were given 110 training trials on a task in which they…

A recent cross-cultural comparison (Shaki, Fischer, & Petrusic, 2009) suggested that spatially consistent processing habits for words and numbers are a necessary condition for the spatial representation of numbers (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes; SNARC effect). Here we reexamine the SNARC in Israelis who read text from right…

Despite their lack of vision, congenitally blind subjects are able to build and manipulate cognitive maps for spatial navigation. It is assumed that they thereby rely more heavily on echolocation, proprioceptive signals and environmental cues such as ambient temperature and audition to compensate for their lack of vision. Little is known, however,…

The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet…

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show a specific deficit in visuo-spatial abilities. This finding, however, derives mainly from performance on small-scale laboratory-based tasks. This study investigated large-scale route learning in individuals with WS and two matched control groups (moderate learning difficulty group [MLD], typically…

Though auditory pitch is customarily mapped in Western cultures onto spatial verticality (high-low), both anthropological reports and cognitive studies suggest that pitch may be mapped onto a wide variety of other domains. We collected a total number of 35 pitch mappings and investigated in four experiments how these mappings are used and…

This study assessed the efficiency of a model of a familiar urban area for enhancing knowledge of the spatial environment by adults with visual impairments. It found a significant improvement in knowledge of spatial configuration after exposure to the model, suggesting that models are powerful means of developing cognitive mapping in people who…