One hundred and six undergraduates searched a hypermedia environment under three navigational conditions, wrote an essay measuring their comprehension, and completed a test of metacognition. The map conditions were spatial/semantic, spatial only, and none. Analyses revealed that a navigational map capable of incurring an integrative cognitive…

Three- to six-year-old children (n=28) and adults (n=46) participated in a two-dimensional search task that included geometry and feature conditions. During each of 24 trials, participants watched as a cartoon character hid behind one of three landmarks arranged in a triangle on a computer screen. The landmarks and character then disappeared and…

Using animated computer-generated graphics to assist instruction has recently attracted the attention of educators and educational researchers. The specific focus of this study is to compare the influence of animated visuals with static visuals on college students' understanding of organic reaction mechanisms in chemistry. This study also focuses…

This article examines whether questions embedded in geography textbooks address three components of spatial thinking: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. A three-dimensional taxonomy of spatial thinking was developed and used to evaluate questions in four high school level geography textbooks. The results…

Demonstrates that the tendency toward canonicality is reduced when objects in differing orientation are presented side by side. The number of canonical errors is reduced when the object is opaque. (Author)

Attempts to resolve empirically apparent contradictions regarding the role of landmarks by manipulating directly the salience or "noticeability" of the landmarks available to young children in a spatial memory task. Assesses whether direction traveled at time of recall affects accuracy of young children's memory for spatial location. (RH)

Results indicated that three- and four-year-olds judge area by a height plus width rule. This adding rule was interpreted in terms of a general purpose judgmental strategy that young children employ to make quantitative judgments. (JMB)

Investigated 5-month-olds' perception of an object whose center was occluded and whose ends were visible only in succession. Found that infants perceived the object as one connected whole when the ends underwent common motion but not when the ends were stationary. Results suggest that infants perceive object unity but not object form. (Author/BC)

In three studies, infants reached for objects as distinct units when the objects moved separately or were separated in space. Otherwise, infants reached for objects as one unit. In one study, patterns of dishabituation provided further evidence that separated or separately moving objects were perceived as distinct units. (RH)

Six experiments examined whether there were circumstances in which toddlers could use landmarks for spatial reorientation. Findings confirmed that geometric information is used for reorientation by toddlers, but give reason to doubt that the use of this information is achieved using a module impenetrable to nongeometric information. (Author/KB)

A mathematical model of working-memory capacity limits is proposed on the key assumption of mutual interference between items in working memory. Interference is assumed to arise from overwriting of features shared by these items. The model was fit to time-accuracy data of memory-updating tasks from four experiments using nonlinear mixed effect…

A basic problem of visual perception is how human beings recognize objects after spatial transformations. Three central classes of findings have to be accounted for: (a) Recognition performance varies systematically with orientation, size, and position; (b) recognition latencies are sequentially additive, suggesting analogue transformation…

Conveying complex mental scenarios is at the heart of human language. Advances in cognitive linguistics suggest this is mediated by an ability to activate cognitive systems involved in non-linguistic processing of spatial information. In this fMRI-study, we compare sentences with a concrete spatial meaning to sentences with an abstract meaning.…

In 3 experiments, the authors studied the organization of spatiotemporal information in memory. Stimuli consisted of configurations of dots, presented sequentially. The stimuli were either proportional, with interdot distances corresponding to interdot durations, or not proportional, with interdol distances not corresponding to interdot durations.…

Simon effects might partly reflect stimulus-triggered response activation. According to the response-discrimination hypothesis, however, stimulus-triggered response activation shows up in Simon effects only when stimulus locations match the top-down selected spatial codes used to discriminate between alternative responses. Five experiments support…