We examine how rectangular array model can support students' spatial structuring in learning multiplication. To begin, we define what we mean by spatial structuring as the mental operation of constructing an organization or form for an object or set of objects. For that reason, the eggs problem was chosen as the starting point in which the…

The greatest difficulty that is encountered by students in thermodynamics classes is to find relationships between variables and to solve a total differential equation that relates one thermodynamic state variable to two mutually independent state variables. Rules of differentiation, including the total differential and the cyclic rule, are…

Past studies have suggested that study time allocation partially mediates age relations on memory performance in a verbal task. To identify whether this applied to a different material modality, participants ages 20-87 completed a spatial task in addition to a traditional verbal task. In both the verbal and the spatial task, increased age was…

Emotion tunes cognition, such that approach-motivated positive states promote verbal cognition, whereas withdrawal-motivated negative states promote spatial cognition (Gray, 2001). The current research examined whether self-control resources become depleted and influence subsequent behavior when emotion tunes an inappropriate cognitive tendency.…

Infant eye tracking is becoming increasingly popular for its presumed precision relative to traditional looking time paradigms and potential to yield new insights into developmental processes. However, there is strong reason to suspect that the temporal and spatial resolution of popular eye tracking systems is not entirely accurate, potentially…

This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information and the relation between communication and mental representation. Children (8-10 years) and adults walked through a space to learn the locations of six hidden toy animals and then explained the space to another person. In Study 1, older children and…

Current GPS-based mobile navigation assistance systems support wayfinding, but they do not support learning about the spatial configuration of an environment. The present study examined effects of visual presentation modes for navigation assistance on wayfinding accuracy, route learning, and configural learning. Participants (high-school students)…

Primary somatosensory maps in the brain represent the body as a discontinuous, fragmented set of two-dimensional (2-D) skin regions. We nevertheless experience our body as a coherent three-dimensional (3-D) volumetric object. The links between these different aspects of body representation, however, remain poorly understood. Perceiving the body's…

Hypertexts include new structural features, such as navigable graphical overviews, that dramatically change the way students interact with texts. Nevertheless, at school students traditionally practice literacy skills appropriate for reading and comprehending printed texts. We explored the possibility that those skills might not be the same as the…

Mariners actively adjust their body orientation in response to ship motion. On a ship at sea, we evaluated relations between standing postural activity and the performance of a precision aiming task. Standing participants (experienced mariners) maintained the beam from a handheld laser on a target. Targets were large or small, thereby varying the…

The dorsal hippocampus is crucial for mammalian spatial memory, but its exact role in item memory is still hotly debated. Recent evidence in humans suggested that the hippocampus might be selectively involved in item short-term memory to deal with an increasing memory load. In this study, we sought to test this hypothesis. To this aim we developed…

The aim of this study was to investigate route-learning ability in 67 children aged 5 to 11 years and to relate route-learning performance to the components of Baddeley's model of working memory. Children carried out tasks that included measures of verbal and visuospatial short-term memory and executive control and also measures of verbal and…

Spatial cognition and memory are critical cognitive skills underlying foraging behaviors for all primates. While the emergence of these skills has been the focus of much research on human children, little is known about ontogenetic patterns shaping spatial cognition in other species. Comparative developmental studies of nonhuman apes can…

We investigated the impact of readers' visuo-spatial (VS) capacity on their incidental learning of page links during the exploration of simple hierarchical hypertextual documents. Forty-three university students were asked to explore a series of hypertexts for a limited period of time. Then the participants were asked to recall the layout and the…

Number-to-space mapping and its directionality are compelling topics in the study of numerical cognition. Usually, literacy and math education are thought to shape a left-to-right number line. We challenged this claim by analyzing performance of preliterate precounting preschoolers in a spatial-numerical task. In our experiment, children exhibited…