This research examined a potential mechanism underlying gender differences in math performance by testing a mediation model in which women's higher anxiety taxes their working memory resources, leading to underperformance on a mathematics test. Participants for the 2 studies were college students (N = 87, N = 118) who completed an anxiety measure,…

Recent studies have advocated that mathematical meaning is mediated by gestures. This case study explores the gestures kindergarten children produce when learning spatial concepts in a mathematics classroom setting. Based on a video study of a mathematical lesson in a kindergarten class, we concentrated on the verbal and non-verbal behavior of one…

Online education is becoming an increasingly popular venture for postsecondary institutions. It is an often controversial undertaking with proponents lauding the possibilities of technological advancements to increase access to education, while critics question the value and form of pedagogy on offer. This paper examines the potential and problems…

Twenty-four pre-service teachers participated in a workshop designed to provide explicit opportunities to learn what spatial thinking is and how to incorporate it into teaching practice. The objectives of this paper are to: (1) examine the educational effect of the workshop on pre-service teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and (2)…

Late ventral visual areas generally consist of cells having a significant degree of translation invariance. Such a "bag of features" representation is useful for the recognition of individual objects; however, it seems unable to explain our ability to parse a scene into multiple objects and to understand their spatial relationships. We…

Subitizing is the immediate apprehension of the exact number of items in small sets. Despite more than a 100 years of research around this phenomenon, its nature and origin are still unknown. One view posits that it reflects a number estimation process common for small and large sets, which precision decreases as the number of items increases,…

Spatial pattern separation (SPS) and spatial pattern completion (SPC) have played an increasingly important role in computational and rodent literatures as processes underlying associative memory. SPS and SPC are complementary processes, allowing the formation of unique representations and the reconstruction of complete spatial environments based…

The article analyses a collaborative effort of learning across workplace boundaries in a regional learning network of South Savo, Finland. The focus is on the "Forum of In-house Development" in the network. Our objective is to highlight a dialectical approach to boundaries that draws from the ideas of cultural-historical activity theory.…

Distinct cognitive and neural mechanisms underlie perception and action in near (within-reach) and far (outside-reach) space. Objects in far space can be brought into the brain's near-space through tool-use. We determined whether a near object can be pushed into far space by changing the pictorial context in which it occurs. Participants (n = 372)…

Following Husserl's speculations on how geometry originated, we suggest that spatial perception is "seduced" by language as a result of human attempts to capture, signify and share its concepts. And this language traps geometry and humans themselves in to the forms that have guided and regulated past practices, thereby obscuring possibilities for…

Language has been linked to spatial representation and behavior in humans, but the nature of this effect is debated. Here, we test whether simple verbal expressions improve 4-year-old children's performance in a disoriented search task in a small rectangular room with a single red landmark wall. Disoriented children's landmark-guided search for a…

Attention can be oriented to different spatial locations yielding faster processing of attended compared to unattended stimuli. Similarly attention can be oriented to a semantic category such as "animals" or "tools". Words from the attended category will also be recognized faster than words from an unattended category. Here, we asked whether it is…

Co-thought gestures are hand movements produced in silent, noncommunicative, problem-solving situations. In the study, we investigated whether and how such gestures enhance performance in spatial visualization tasks such as a mental rotation task and a paper folding task. We found that participants gestured more often when they had difficulties…

Echolocation is a specialized application of spatial hearing that uses reflected auditory information to localize objects and represent the external environment. Although it has been documented extensively in nonhuman species, such as bats and dolphins, its use by some persons who are blind as a navigation and object-identification aid has…

Five experiments tested a haptic analog of optical looming, demonstrating string-mediated haptic distal spatial perception. Horizontally collinear hooks supported a weighted string held taut by a blindfolded participant's finger midway between the hooks. At the finger, the angle between string segments increased as the finger approached…