During locomotion, retinal flow, gaze angle, and vestibular information can contribute to one's perception of self-motion. Their respective roles were investigated during active steering: Retinal flow and gaze angle were biased by altering the visual information during computer-simulated locomotion, and vestibular information was controlled…

The line-bisection task, adapted to utilise a wooden rod as the bisection stimulus, has revealed that patients with visuo-spatial neglect may be more accurate at bisection when asked to pick up the rod, compared to pointing to its centre. We recently reported that neurologically intact participants show a similar dissociation on this…

The dentate gyrus (DG) subregion of the hippocampus has been shown to be involved in encoding but not retrieval in a spatial maze task (modified Hebb-Williams maze). The first experiment in this study examined whether a lesion to the CA3 would contribute to a similar encoding deficit. A DG group was included in order to replicate previous results.…

The transcription factor cAMP response-element binding protein (CREB) has a pivotal role in hippocampal synaptic plasticity and hippocampus-dependent long-term memory. We recently demonstrated that the dorsal hippocampal CA3 region is involved in memory consolidation of spatial information tested on a Morris water maze in mice. To test whether…

Four experiments used a preferential looking method to investigate 6-month-old infants' capacity to represent numerosity in visual-spatial displays. Building on previous findings that such infants discriminate between arrays of eight versus 16 discs, but not eight versus 12 discs (Xu & Spelke, 2000), Experiments 1 and 2 investigated whether…

Serial order is fundamental to perception, cognition and behavioral action. Three experiments investigated infants' perception, learning and discrimination of serial order. Four- and 8-month-old infants were habituated to three sequentially moving objects making visible and audible impacts and then were tested on separate test trials for their…

Five theories of how letter position is coded are contrasted: position-specific slot-coding, Wickelcoding, open-bigram coding (discrete and continuous), and spatial coding. These theories make different predictions regarding the relative similarity of three different types of pairs of letter strings: substitution neighbors,…

Spatial skills are known to vary widely among normal individuals. This project was designed to address whether these individual differences are differentially related to large-scale environmental learning from route (ground-level) and survey (aerial) perspectives. Participants learned two virtual environments (route and survey) with limited…

In contextual cueing, the position of a target within a group of distractors is learned over repeated exposure to a display with reference to a few nearby items rather than to the global pattern created by the elements. The authors contrasted the role of global and local contexts for contextual cueing in naturalistic scenes. Experiment 1 showed…

Faces are perceived holistically, a phenomenon best illustrated when the processing of a face feature is affected by the other features. Here, the authors tested the hypothesis that the holistic perception of a face mainly relies on its low spatial frequencies. Holistic face perception was tested in two classical paradigms: the whole-part…

Four experiments investigated the nature of spatial representations used in locomotion. Participants learned the layout of several objects and then pointed to the objects while blindfolded in 3 conditions: before turning (baseline), after turning to a new heading (updating), and after disorientation (disorientation). The internal consistency of…

The linguistic and cognitive profiles of five deaf adults with a sign language disorder were compared with those of matched deaf controls. The test involved a battery of sign language tests, a signed narrative discourse task and a neuropsychological test protocol administered in sign language. Spatial syntax and facial processing were examined in…

Middle school teachers realize the value of students playing games in mathematics classes if those games emphasize problem-solving strategies, algebraic reasoning, or spatial sense. This article describes various versions of the traditional game of nim and shows how working backward can be used to find a winning strategy. The link is then made…

Students identified by talent search programs were studied to determine whether spatial ability could uncover math-science promise. In Phase 1, interests and values of intellectually talented adolescents (617 boys, 443 girls) were compared with those of top math-science graduate students (368 men, 346 women) as a function of their standing on…

Spatial ability based on measures of mental rotation, and spatial experience based on self-reported participation in visual-arts as well as spatial-orientation activities were assessed in a sample of 337 Chinese, gifted students. Consistent with past findings for the general population, there were gender differences in spatial ability favoring…