This book takes student inside the vast continent of Africa. The goal of these lessons is to provide young students with a look at contemporary Africa and to give them a feeling for the rich diversity of the many different nations of the continent. The lessons integrate language arts and geography, and some lessons include math. This book…

This collection of activities is designed to show how graphics display calculators can be used to explore pentominoes and tangrams. Activities include games and puzzles developing spatial relations. Teaching notes, solutions, and calculator instructions are included as are blackline masters. (MM)

A number of hypotheses about infants' delayed search accuracy have been based upon the notion that a location associated with repeated retrieval of an object attains privileged status. However, a test of performance in 12- and 15-month-old infants showed them to be indifferent to location. (Author/RH)

Tested the hypothesis that sex differences in patterns of cognitive ability could be accounted for by variation in identification with sex-role stereotypes. Males performed better on tests of spatial ability, and females performed better on tests of fluent production. The study's hypothesis, however, was not supported. (GC)

Examined memory for the lateral orientation of scenic pictures in young (N=112) and older (N=109) adults in two experiments under incidental or intentional learning conditions. Results suggested an age-related deficit in truly non-intentional encoding of orientation and pose a challenge for capacity theories of memory across the lifespan. (JAC)

In order to determine whether non-Western children would show a memory deficit for contextually organized spatial ability, the performances of 30 Mayan and 30 American nine-year-olds on reconstruction of an organized three-dimensional miniature scene were examined. (MP)

Eighty boys and 80 girls ages 9 to 10 from elementary schools in Naples, Italy completed a spatial span test and a spatial serial-learning task. Corsi's block-tapping test was used in each. Males performed better in both cases; their superior performance on the spatial serial-learning task was independent of their superiority in the spatial-span…

Describes how orientation maps can be incorporated into geographic slide lectures to keep students mindful of spatial relationships. (AM)

Examined the conditions under which infants employ (1) spatial codes respondent to objects central to their visual field and (2) spatial codes respondent to objects peripheral to their visual field. (DB)

Piaget and Inhelder's Water-level Task, the Preschool Embedded Figures Test, and a mental processing measure called Mr. Cucui were administered to 42 four-year-olds. The significant correlation between Mr. Cucui and the horizontal/vertical bottles was discussed from the neo-Piagetian perspective of Pascual-Leone's theory of constructive operators.…

Piaget presents an account in which children's abilities to appreciate points of view are intimately related to their capacities for operational thought. To examine this hypothesis, children ages three to seven were given tasks requiring the coordination of visual-spatial perspectives and tests of operational thinking. Subjects exhibited potential…

Seventy-five children, 6 to 13 years of age, were assigned to one of five groups on the basis of Piagetian tests of spatial-geometrical knowledge. Subjects imagined and executed three transformations of geometric figures: square-enlargement, diamond enlargement and transformation of a small diamond into a large square. (CM)

In Experiment I, 24 preschoolers were tested on left-right, vertical-horizontal, and mirror-image oblique discriminations under essentially context-free conditions. Experiment II contrasted children's performance under context-free conditions with their ability to discriminate orientation in the presence of external visual cues. (RH)

Critically reviews literature relevant to the hypothesis that a major X-linked gene determines spatial ability in man. It is concluded that belief in the validity of the hypothesis is unfounded. (Author/SS)

Describes the American mathematical psychologists' computer-based method of constructing representations of the psychological structure of a set of stimuli on the basis of pairwise measures of similarity on confusability. Psychological structure is represented utilizing multidimensional spatial configurations and nondimensional tree-structures or…