In a mental rotation task, children 5 and 6 years of age and adults had to decide as quickly as possible if a photograph of a hand showed a left or a right limb. The visually presented hands were left and right hands in palm or in back view, presented in four different angles of rotation. Participants had to give their responses with their own…

The cAMP/PKA pathway plays a critical role in learning and memory systems in animals ranging from mice to "Drosophila" to "Aplysia." Studies of olfactory learning in "Drosophila" suggest that altered expression of either positive or negative regulators of the cAMP/PKA signaling pathway beyond a certain optimum range may be deleterious. Here we…

Surface similarity generally promotes reasoning by analogy and physical similarity has been shown to have a powerful positive effect on very young children's use of a scale model as a source of information about another space. The research reported here investigated 2 1/2-year-old children's performance in an object retrieval task when asked to…

Previous research has shown that synchronized flicker can facilitate detection of a single Kanizsa square. The present study investigated the role of temporally structured priming in discrimination tasks involving perceptual relations between multiple Kanizsa-type figures. Results indicate that visual information presented as temporally structured…

Purpose: Investigations of the cognitive processes underlying specific language impairment (SLI) have implicated deficits in verbal short-term and working memory and in particular the storage and processing of phonological information. This study investigated short-term and working memory for visuospatial material for a group of children with SLI,…

In this paper, results from a subset of the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test and a self-efficacy test developed by the authors are presented to determine whether certain object shapes, orientations, and types of rotations in standard spatial ability tests cause more difficulty than others and whether a solid object, which includes shading to…

This volume is a teacher's edition in a series of books that contain open-ended exploration activities and experiments. These activities allow and encourage students to set their own goals, use their own creativity and ideas, investigate the wonders of nature, learn about the workings of real businesses, and draw conclusions from their…

Information coordination tasks are tasks that require concurrent performance of two or more component tasks and the subsequent coordination of component information. In this experiment, different procedures, componential and contextual, were used to train separate groups of college campus community members (n=35 and n=33) in a coordination task…

A study investigated how Cantonese children acquire word order in the locative system, which is very complex in their native language. Focus was on three semantic categories: static location, locative source, and locative goal. Subjects were 32 monolingual Cantonese children aged 2.5 to 5.9 in four age groups. Each subject performed four tasks,…

Children's memory for spatial locations in a room designed to look like a grocery store was examined. In the first of two studies, 48 preschoolers completed a memory task for spatial locations problem and an incidental recall task in two room arrangements varying in logical organization. Memory for spatial locations was higher in a clustered and…

A systematic research program will study the cumulative effects of selected instructional variables on learning a spatial visualization task. The goal of the research is to identify instructional variables that will improve the performance of female students on the Aircraft Instrument Comprehension (AIC) test. The AIC program is intended to teach…

This exploratory study investigated whether there are differences between males and females in the strategies used to construct mental representations from three-dimensional objects in a dimensional travel display. A Silicon Graphics IRIS computer was used to create the travel displays and mathematical models were created for each of the objects…

The subjects for this study, which examined the relationship of cognitive style and ability to the initial acquisition of computer programming competence, were 46 college students enrolled in a computer literacy course. The selected cognitive style (field-independence) and three cognitive abilities (logical reasoning, spatial ability, and…

Efforts are underway to determine if there are any unique ways to Navajo thinking and thus to the way they might learn. Studies have shown a consistent lag in achievement levels for Native Americans, especially after seventh grade. At least three possible explanations for this phenomenon are viable: (1) They are deficient in the needed skills to…

Whether or not a short-term intervention program could improve performance on standardized figural analogy and surface development tests was studied through training 10 students from an introductory psychology class with relatively low scores on the figural analogies subtest of the Cognitive Abilities Test. An additional 10 students served as…