The purpose of this study is to investigate, via a model, the explanatory and predictive relationships among the following variables: Mathematical Problem Solving and Reasoning Skills, Sources of Mathematics Self-Efficacy, Spatial Ability, and Mathematics Achievements of Secondary School 8th Grade Students. The sample group of the study, itself…

This study compares an interactive learning manager for graphic engineering to develop spatial vision (ILMAGE_SV) to traditional methods. ILMAGE_SV is an asynchronous web-based learning tool that allows the manipulation of objects with a 3D viewer, self-evaluation, and continuous assessment. In addition, student learning may be monitored, which…

Students' different learning performance on mathematical problem solving across contexts has attracted a number of researchers' interest. The study investigates the spatial orientation ability of primary school students in an outdoor situation, where six pairs of grade six students are asked to coordinate themselves physically in terms of given…

This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time--for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about…

Computer visualizations are increasingly common in education across a range of subject disciplines, including anatomy. Despite optimism about their educational potential, students sometime have difficulty learning from these visualizations. The purpose of this study was to explore a range of factors that influence spatial anatomy comprehension…

Growing experimental evidence suggests that temporal events are represented on a mental time line, spatially oriented from left to right. Support for the spatial representation of time comes mostly from studies that have used spatially organized responses. Moreover, many of these studies did not avoid possible confounds attributable to target…

Recent results from Vo and Wolfe (2012b) suggest that the application of memory to visual search may be task specific: Previous experience searching for an object facilitated later search for that object, but object information acquired during a different task did not appear to transfer to search. The latter inference depended on evidence that a…

Visuospatial ability has been shown to be important to several aspects of laparoscopic performance, including simulator training. Only a limited subset of visuospatial ability factors however has been investigated in such studies. Tests for different visuospatial ability factors differ in stimulus complexity, in their emphasis on identifying…

Same-different categorization is a fundamental feat of human cognition. Although birds and nonhuman primates readily learn same-different discriminations and successfully transfer them to novel stimuli, no such demonstration exists for rats. Using a spatial discrimination learning task, we show that rats can both learn to discriminate arrays of…

This study examined the influence of juggling training on mental rotation ability in children with spina bifida. Children between the ages of 8 and 12 solved a chronometric mental rotation test. Half of the children received juggling training (EG) over an 8 week time period; the other half did not receive training (CG). Afterwards, all…

In two experiments the neuronal mechanisms of sex differences in mental rotation were investigated. In Experiment 1 cortical activation was studied in women and men with similar levels of mental rotation ability (high, and average to low), who were equalized with respect to general intelligence. Sex difference in neuroelectric patterns of brain…

Previous studies have demonstrated that discriminative learning is facilitated when a particular outcome is associated with each relation to be learned. When this training procedure is applied (the differential outcome procedure; DOP), learning is faster and more accurate than when the more common non-differential outcome procedure is used. This…

When we look at a scene, we are conscious of only a small fraction of the available visual information at any given point in time. This raises profound questions regarding how information is selected, when awareness occurs, and the nature of the mechanisms underlying these processes. One tool that may be used to probe these issues is…

A target object's location within a configuration of objects can be described by spatially relating it to a reference object that is selected from among its neighbors, with a preference for reference objects that are spatially close and aligned with the target. In the spatial memory literature, these properties of alignment and proximity are…

In the lesson on which this practical article is based, third grade students constructed a "lift-the-flap" page to explore food webs on the prairie. The moveable papercraft focused student attention on prairie animals' external structures and how the inferred functions of those structures could support further inferences about the…