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…

Computational thinking requires high cognitive load as students work to manage multiple tasks in their problem-solving environment. Through research in K-2 classrooms on computational thinking, we noticed that students lack the representational fluency needed to move from one form to another--such as moving from physical to more abstract…

With a rising aging population, it is important to develop behavioral tasks that assess and track cognitive decline, and to identify protective factors that promote healthy brain aging. Mnemonic discrimination tasks that rely on pattern separation mechanisms are a promising metric to detect subtle age-related memory impairments. Behavioral…

The main purpose of this study was to assess children's skill in using a simple map. The study was conducted among 262 children (141 girls and 121 boys), aged between 61-78 months (average 71 months), attending to 4 public pre-schools in Istanbul, Turkey. The simple map skills (requiring mental rotation and understanding spatial relation) of the…

Target onsets in dynamically changing displays can be predicted when contingencies exist between different stimulus states over time. In the present study, we examined predictive monitoring when participants searched dynamically changing displays of numbers and colored squares for a color target, a number target, or both. Stimuli were presented in…

Time is closely linked to people's representation of spatial experience. Previous research showed that adults primed with positive affect judged that they were approaching the event (ego-moving), whereas those primed with negative affect reported that the event was approaching them (event-moving). The present research investigated the…

This study took a novel approach to understanding the role of language in spatial development by combining approaches from spatial language and gesture research. It analyzed forty-three 4.5- to 6-year-old's speech and gesture production during explanations of reasoning behind performance on Spatial Analogies and Children's Mental Transformation…

Previous research has demonstrated that cognitive offloading (i.e., externalizing mental processes) is useful for immediate problem solving. However, long-term effects of cognitive offloading on subsequent problem solving without offloading are remarkably understudied. Our main goal was to investigate the effects of representation control (i.e.,…

Spatial visualization--the ability to mentally imagine and manipulate objects--has frequently been measured using the Paper Folding Test (PFT). In this task, participants view diagrams of a paper being folded and a hole being punched. They then identify the resulting punch pattern. Although task instructions promote mentally unfolding the paper,…

Background: Key to optimizing Computational Thinking (CT) instruction is a precise understanding of the underlying cognitive skills. Román-González et al. (2017) reported unique contributions of spatial abilities and reasoning, whereas arithmetic was not significantly related to CT. Disentangling the influence of spatial and numerical skills on CT…

As a basic indicator of verbal ability, verbal fluency refers to the degree of fluency in the use of language to convey information. The different components of working memory play an important role in verbal fluency. The inhibiting control mechanism takes place during L2 production processing in bilinguals, which may affect their verbal fluency…

Multisensory interactions in deaf cognition are largely unexplored. Unisensory studies suggest that behavioral/neural changes may be more prominent for visual compared to tactile processing in early deaf adults. Here we test whether such an asymmetry results in increased saliency of vision over touch during visuo-tactile interactions. About 23…

The pattern separation task has recently emerged as a behavioral model of hippocampus function and has been used in several pharmaceutical trials. The canine is a useful model to evaluate a multitude of hippocampal-dependent cognitive tasks that parallel those in humans. Thus, this study was designed to evaluate the suitability of pattern…

The aim of the present study was to test environmental and cognitive variables as possible cross-domain predictors of early literacy and numeracy skills. One hundred forty-eight preschool children (mean age = 64.36 months ± 3.33) were enrolled in the study. The battery included a home literacy and home numeracy questionnaire, measures and…

The present research studied the role of the non-executive and executive components of working memory in the detection of phonological, orthographical, and grammatical spelling errors. Before performing error detection tasks, undergraduate participants completed a battery of tasks to evaluate their non-executive (verbal and visuospatial storage)…