Evidence from experiments designed to elicit the phenomenon of perisaccadic mislocalization of briefly presented probe stimuli suggests that mechanisms implicated in the planning of a saccade are also implicated in the means by which spatial constancy is maintained across saccades. We postulated that impairments of visual attention observed in…

Recent spatial cuing studies have shown that detection sensitivity can be increased by the allocation of attention. This increase has been attributed to one of two mechanisms: signal enhancement or uncertainty reduction. Signal enhancement is an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio at the cued location; uncertainty reduction is a reduction in the…

Left-right keypresses to numerals are faster for pairings of small numbers to left response and large numbers to right response than for the opposite pairings. This spatial numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect has been attributed to numbers being represented on a mental number line. We examined this issue in 3 experiments using a…

When a moving object abruptly disappears, this profoundly influences its localization by the visual system. In Experiment 1, 2 aligned objects moved across the screen, and 1 of them abruptly disappeared. Observers reported seeing the objects misaligned at the time of the offset, with the continuing object leading. Experiment 2 showed that the…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to compare brain activation from native Japanese (L1) readers reading hiragana (syllabic) and kanji (logographic) sentences, and English as a second language (L2). Kanji showed more activation than hiragana in right-hemisphere occipito-temporal lobe areas associated with visuospatial…

Both "teaching" and "teaching" with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are "wicked problems," in the sense that they involve multiple variables that interact with one another. Effective teaching calls for both learning with understanding and transfer. The authors' own experience implementing a geography and…

There has been a significant history of research on spatial ability and visualization improvement and related curriculum content presented by members of the Engineering Design Graphics Division over the past decade. Recently, interest in this topic has again been heightened thanks to the work of several division members on research such as the…

Reorientation tasks, in which disoriented participants attempt to relocate objects using different visual cues, have previously been understood to depend on representing aspects of the global organisation of the space, for example its major axis for judgements based on geometry. Careful analysis of the visual information available for these tasks…

A spatial-skills test is used to examine the effect of GIS learning on the spatial thinking ability of college students. Eighty students at a large state university completed pre- and post- spatial-skills tests administered during the 2003 fall semester. Analysis of changes in the students' test scores revealed that GIS learning helped students…

To investigate maturational plasticity of fluid cognition systems, functional brain imaging was undertaken in healthy 8-19 year old participants while completing visuospatial relational reasoning problems similar to Raven's matrices and current elementary grade math textbooks. Analyses revealed that visuospatial relational reasoning across this…

The purpose of this study was to examine predictors of music sight-reading ability. The authors hypothesized that speed and accuracy of music sight-reading would be predicted by a combination of aural pattern discrimination, spatial-temporal reasoning, and technical proficiency. Participants (N = 70) were wind players in concert bands at a…

The inability to navigate independently and interact with the wider world is one of the most significant handicaps that can be caused by blindness, second only to the inability to communicate through reading and writing. Many difficulties are encountered when visually impaired people (VIP) need to visit new and unknown places. Current speech or…

The utilization of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and geobrowsers (Google Earth) have become increasingly prevalent in the study of genocide. These applications offer teachers and students the opportunity to analyze historical and contemporary genocidal acts from a critical geographic perspective in which the confluence of historical…

We previously reported a meta-analysis of explicit memory studies in populations with intellectual disability (ID). The current study discusses the educational implications of this meta-analysis. The main factors at the core of these implications can be divided into two categories: those related to task characteristics (e.g., depth of processing,…

This study investigated whether a geospatial information technology (GIT)-supported science curriculum helped students in an urban middle school understand land use change (LUC) concepts and enhanced their spatial thinking. Five 8th grade earth and space science classes in an urban middle school consisting of three different ability level tracks…