When humans plan to execute a tool-use action, they can only specify the bodily movement parameters by taking into account the external target or goal of the tool-use action and the target-movement mapping implemented by the tool. In this study, the authors used the movement precuing method to investigate how people prepare for actions made with…

Two lick suppression studies were conducted with water-deprived rats to investigate the influence of spatial similarity in cue interaction. Experiment 1 assessed the influence of similarity of the spatial origin of competing cues in a blocking procedure. Greater blocking was observed in the condition in which the auditory blocking cue and the…

The conditional intervention principle is a formal principle that relates patterns of interventions and outcomes to causal structure. It is a central assumption of experimental design and the causal Bayes net formalism. Two studies suggest that preschoolers can use the conditional intervention principle to distinguish causal chains, common cause…

[alpha]CaMKII[superscript T286A] mutant mice lack long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampal CA1 region and are impaired in spatial learning. In situ hybridization confirms that the mutant mice show the same developmental expression of [alpha]CaMKII as their wild-type littermates. A simple hypothesis would suggest that if LTP is a substrate…

The notions cognitive space and cognitive/mental maps were proposed in the late 1940s, and have been extensively studied since the 1970s within behavioral geography, as well as within tangent disciplines, notably environmental psychology and architecture. Viewing these notions from the perspective of the 2000s, one can state that the hidden…

We conducted four experiments to examine developmental differences in preferences for using color, size, and location information to disambiguate hiding places. Three- and 4-year-olds and adults described how to find a miniature mouse that was hidden in one of two highly similar small objects in a dollhouse. In Experiment 1, the hiding places…

This study examined 6-month-old infants' abilities to use the visual information provided by simulated self-movement through the world, and movement of an object through the world, for spatial orientation. Infants were habituated to a visual display in which they saw a toy hidden, followed by either rotation of the point of observation through the…

A holiday quilt project in a kindergarten classroom becomes a focus for exploring patterns, shapes, measurement, spatial relationships, and number sense. Cooperative group work, problem solving, and communication of mathematical ideas enhance the completion of the project. (Contains 5 figures.)

The performance of deaf children with cochlear implants was assessed using measures standardized on hearing children. To investigate nonverbal cognitive and sensorimotor processes associated with postimplant variability, five selected sensorimotor and visuospatial subtests from "A Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment" (NEPSY) were compared…

It is not often that one can introduce primary school students to a problem at the forefront of mathematics research, and have any expectation of understanding; but with magic squares, one can do exactly that. Magic squares are an ideal tool for the effective illustration of many mathematical concepts. This paper assumes little prior knowledge on…

This article considers steps towards making a numeracy-across-the-curriculum policy. Numeracy means more than the kind of everyday arithmetic a person (a competent independent adult) needs to handle whole number (and simple decimal) calculations; e.g., money, time, and simple measurement. Importantly, aspects of numeracy arise in any everyday task…

Language is generally viewed as conveying information through symbols whose form is arbitrarily related to their meaning. This arbitrary relation is often assumed to also characterize the mental representations underlying language comprehension. We explore the idea that visuo-spatial information can be analogically conveyed through acoustic…

Individuals with the rare genetic disorder, Williams syndrome, have an unusual cognitive profile with relatively good language abilities but poor non-verbal and spatial skills. This study explored the interaction between linguistic and spatial functioning in Williams syndrome by investigating individuals' comprehension of spatial language. A group…

This paper reports the results of four dual-task experiments that were designed to determine the extent of domain-specificity of the verbal working memory resources used in linguistic integrations. To address this question, syntactic complexity was crossed in a 2x2 design with the complexity of a secondary task, which involved either (1)…

Hemisphere-specific processing of laterally presented global and local stimulus levels was investigated by (a) examining interactions between the visual field of stimulus presentation and the response hand and (b) comparing intra- with inter-hemispheric effects of level priming (i.e. faster and more accurate performance when the target level…