Visual-spatial ability has been identified as one of the primary factors of intelligence. Numerous tests, including paper-and-pencil tasks and laboratory experiments, have attempted to provide an accurate measure of this ability. However, the majority of these tests serve only as surrogate measures of visual-spatial ability and may not provide a…

In this paper I illustrate how kinaesthetic experiences associated with dance might be used in teaching to promote engagement and learning in spatial, rhythmic, structural and symbolic aspects of mathematics.

Utilization of a footprint trail for locating a hidden person may indicate the extension of semiotics to the spatial domain of search. We sought to determine whether young children implemented footprint tracking, and found that at 3-years they successfully tracked footprints on only 3% of trials, at 4-years on 9% of trials, and at 5-years on 41%…

In two experiments in a Morris pool, rats were trained to find a hidden platform which was located in a specific position in relation to two objects, B and F, which were presented together, one in front of the other. One object, B, was just above the platform (a beacon for the platform, the critical object) while the second object, F, was above…

A central problem for psychology is vision's reaction to perspective. In the present studies, observers looked at perspective pictures projected by square tiles on a ground plane. They judged the tile dimensions while positioned at the correct distance, farther or nearer. In some pictures, many tiles appeared too short to be squares, many too…

This study investigated whether brain neural activity that accompanied the processing of previously learned map information was influenced by the modality in which the spatial parameters of the maps were originally learned. Participants learned a map by either viewing it directly or by reading an equivalent verbal description. Following learning,…

This study examined the role of stimulus characteristics in a visuospatial order reconstruction task in which participants were required to recall the order of sequences of spatial locations. The complexity of the to-be-remembered sequences, as measured by path crossing, path length, and angles, was found to affect serial memory, in terms of both…

Although considerable progress has been made in understanding how adults perceive their direction of self-motion, or heading, from optic flow, little is known about how these perceptual processes develop in infants. In 3 experiments, the authors explored how well 3- to 6-month-old infants could discriminate between optic flow patterns that…

Four experiments are reported in which people organize a space hierarchically when they estimate particular locations in that space. Earlier work showed that people subdivide circles into quadrants bounded at the vertical and horizontal axes, biasing their estimates towards prototypical diagonal locations within those spatial categories…

What type of mental representation underlies the gestures that accompany speech? We used a dual-task paradigm to compare the demands gesturing makes on visuospatial and verbal working memories. Participants in one group remembered a string of letters (verbal working memory group) and those in a second group remembered a visual grid pattern…

Real-world situations involve attending to spatially extended objects, often under conditions of motion and high processing load. The present experiments investigated such processing by requiring observers to attentionally track a number of long, moving lines. Concurrently, observers responded to sporadic probes as a measure of the distribution of…

It has been recently proposed that the time course of the Simon effect may vary across tasks, which might reflect different types of stimulus-response (S-R) transmissions (E. Wascher, U. Schatz, T. Kuder, & R. Verleger, 2001). The authors tested this notion in 4 experiments by comparing Simon effects evoked by horizontal and vertical S-R…

Humans rely on internal representations to solve a variety of spatial problems including navigation. Navigation employs specific information to compose a representation of space that is distinct from that obtained through static bird's-eye or horizontal perspectives. The ability to point to on-route locations, off-route locations, and the route…

Children who could overcome the gravity error on Hood's (1995) tubes task were tested in a condition where they had to monitor two falling balls. This condition significantly impaired search performance with the majority of mistakes being gravity errors. In a second experiment, the effect of monitoring two balls was compared in the tubes task and…

According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), during early development, perception of nonredundantly specified properties is facilitated in unimodal stimulation as compared with bimodal stimulation. Later in development, attention becomes more flexible and infants can detect nonredundantly specified properties in both unimodal and…