People acquire spatial information from many sources, including maps, verbal descriptions, and navigating in the environment. The different sources present spatial information in different ways. For example, maps can show many spatial relations simultaneously, but in a description, each spatial relation must be presented sequentially. The present…

In working with right-brained or visual spatial children for the past 20 years, the author has noticed that they all learn in a similar manner. He has also noticed that a high percentage of gifted children are visual spatial learners. The more visual spatial a child is, the higher the potential for school difficulties. Since most teachers are…

Measuring the changes in neurotransmitter extracellular levels in discrete brain areas is considered a tool for identifying the neuronal systems involved in specific behavioral responses or cognitive processes. Acetylcholine (ACh) is the first neurotransmitter whose diffusion from the central nervous system was investigated and whose extracellular…

Previous studies have indicated that nonhuman animals might have a capacity for episodic-like recall reflected in memory for "what" events that happened "where" and "when". These studies did not identify the brain structures that are critical to this capacity. Here we trained rats to remember single training episodes, each composed of a series of…

The goal of this work is to extend the theoretical understanding of the relationship between hippocampal spatial and memory functions to the level of neurophysiological mechanisms underlying spatial navigation and episodic memory retrieval. The proposed unifying theory describes both phenomena within a unique framework, as based on one and the…

This study investigates children's ability to use language to guide their choice of individuation criterion in the domains of objects and events. Previous work (Shipley, E. F., & Shepperson, B. (1990). Countable entities: developmental changes. "Cognition," 34, 109-136.) has shown that children have a strong bias to use a spatio-temporal…

This study used cortical source analysis to locate potential cortical sources of event-related potentials (ERPs) during covert orienting in infants aged 14 and 20 weeks. The infants were tested in a spatial cueing procedure. The reaction time to localize the target showed response facilitation for valid trials relative to invalid or neutral…

Human toddlers demonstrate striking failures when searching for hidden objects that interact with other objects, yet successfully locate hidden objects that do not undergo mechanical interactions. This pattern hints at a developmental dissociation between contact-mechanical and spatiotemporal knowledge. Recent studies suggest that adult non-human…

We report the results of an experiment investigating the ramifications of using space to express coreference in American Sign Language (ASL). Nominals in ASL can be associated with locations in signing space, and pronouns are directed toward those locations to convey coreference. A probe recognition technique was used to investigate the case of…

Many educational theorists in recent decades have argued for the plurality of forms of knowledge, both in the mind and in the curriculum. Two popular ways of conceptualizing this plurality have claimed that individual students either differ in their "learning styles" or possess "multiple intelligences". Both theories have encountered numerous…

The well-documented evidence that bilinguals demonstrate cognitive advantages over monolinguals is used as a foundation for the hypothesis that bilinguals will be better able to solve certain spatial tasks, and a theoretical framework for this hypothesis is constructed. The paper describes an experiment to explore this hypothesis. A series of…

The eye movements of skilled readers are typically very regular (K. Rayner, 1998). This regularity may arise as a result of the perceptual, cognitive, and motor limitations of the reader (e.g., limited visual acuity) and the inherent constraints of the task (e.g., identifying the words in their correct order). To examine this hypothesis,…

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a mechanism that results in a performance disadvantage typically observed when targets are presented at a location once occupied by a cue. Although the time course of the phenomenon--from the cue to the target--has been well studied, the time course of the effect--from target to response--is unknown. In 2…

Using a simple change detection task involving vertical and horizontal stimuli, I. M. Thornton and D. Fernandez-Duque (2000) showed that the implicit detection of a change in the orientation of an item influences performance in a subsequent orientation judgment task. However, S. R. Mitroff, D. J. Simons, and S. L. Franconeri (2002) were not able…

Informal journal writing in freshman level World Regional Geography classes is discussed as an active learning method that helps students to develop their spatial perspective and gain a better understanding of the interconnected nature of geographic phenomena. In particular, students read about events in the world and write their ideas about the…