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…

Until now, a successful application of the mental rotation paradigm was restricted to children 5?years or older. By contrast, recent findings suggest that even infants can perform mental rotation. Unlike the methods used in infant studies (looking time), our new research paradigm allows for the measurement and interpretation of reaction times.…

This study examined the influence of juggling training on mental rotation ability in children with spina bifida. Children between the ages of 8 and 12 solved a chronometric mental rotation test. Half of the children received juggling training (EG) over an 8 week time period; the other half did not receive training (CG). Afterwards, all…

High-density ERPs evoked by rotated alphanumeric characters were examined to determine how neural processing is affected by stimulus orientation during letter/digit classifications and during mirror/normal discriminations. The former task typically produces response times that are unaffected by stimulus orientation while the latter is thought to…

In addition to motor execution problems, children with hemiplegia have motor planning deficits, which may stem from poor motor imagery ability. This study aimed to provide a greater understanding of motor imagery ability in children with hemiplegia using the hand rotation task. Three groups of children, aged 8-12 years, participated: right…

The 13th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2020) was originally arranged to take place in Ifrane, Morocco. Due to the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) epidemic, EDM 2020, as well as most other academic conferences in 2020, had to be changed to a purely online format. To facilitate efficient transmission of…

Eight experiments investigated the effects of visual, spatial, auditory, and executive interference on the symbolic comparison of animal size and ferocity, semantic goodness of words, and numbers. Dynamic visual noise (DVN) and the reading of visually presented stimulus items were shown to selectively interfere with response times on the animal…

An information-processing model was tested for a laboratory visualization task that represents one adaptation of a standardized spatial ability test. The pattern of results suggests that individual differences are a function of differences in the accuracy and/or quality of the mental representation, not just speed of processing. (Author/BW)

This paper considers the feasibility of incorporating research results from cognitive science into the modeling of performance on psychometric tests and the construction of test items. The paper focuses on the feasibility of modeling performance on a three-dimensional rotation task within the context of Item Response Theory (IRT). To test the…

Visual recognition, navigation, tracking, and imagery are posited to involve some of the same types of representations and processes. The first part of this paper develops a theory of some of the shared types of representations and processing modules. The theory is developed in light of neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data from non-human…