Data from a 1990-91 sample of professional art school students who were given The Spatial Dimensionality Test showed significant sex-related differences with higher male mean scores on spatial abilities tasks. These findings failed to replicate the 1987 data from the same sample that showed no significant sex-related differences on the same test…

Activity theory is a perspective that is largely rooted in the writing of Soviet psychologists. One of the premises of the theory is that human behavior and thinking occur within meaningful contexts as people conduct purposeful goal directed activity. The primary unit of psychological study should be socially organized human activity, rather than…

This study examines 4-year-olds' ability to search and find a missing object, a complex problem-solving task dependent on remembering events, logically deducing the possible subset of hiding places, and implementing situation-dependent search strategies. Sixty-four children recruited from two day care centers in a small midwestern city searched…

Studies of children's representation of spatial relationships and ability to respond to temporal relationships in photographs are reported. Participants in the study of spatial relationships were 90 children at 5, 8, and 11 years of age, who were asked to reproduce three types of depth relationship: enclosure, occlusion, and perspective. Each…

Infants' use of auditory information in guiding their search behavior is examined in this study. The subjects were two groups of 9-month-old crawling infants. Group 1 consisted of 24 infants and Group 2 of 16 infants. The auditory stimuli was the mother's voice. Infants in both groups were initially positioned by their mothers behind a screen in a…

This study involving 38 normally achieving fourth and fifth grade children confirmed previous studies indicating that both spatial-simultaneous (in which perceived stimuli are totally available at one point in time) and verbal-successive (information is presented in serial order) cognitive processing are important in normal learning. (DB)

Studies were designed to test the prediction that spatial search strategies in infants may be influenced by locomotor experience. The pattern of findings suggests that infants with efficient modes of locomotion are more likely than others to profit from the experiences generated by locomotion. (RJC)

Children and adults in large environments showed no developmental differences in judging distances separated by barriers and not separated by barriers. Variables included type of barrier, distance, and environmental experience. (JS)

The sensitivity of 10 moderately mentally retarded and 10 nonretarded adults to changes in environmental spatial structure with and without visual-environmental clues was examined. Both groups showed similar sensitivity to perspective changes without visual cues, but only the nonretarded demonstrated increased accuracy with the visual cues.…

Four experiments investigated three- and four-year-old children's knowledge of projective size-distance and projective shape-orientation relationships. Results indicated that preschool children's understanding of these relationships seems at least partly cognitive rather than wholly perceptive, providing further evidence for the acquisition of…

The article describes a group motor-route activity to help mulitply handicapped blind students develop a complete understanding of spatial-movement concepts and to increase their cognitive motor skills. (Author/CL)

Sixteen intermediate level hearing-impaired students were examined on perceptions that still water remains invariantly horizontal regardless of container tilt. Similar to findings reported for older hearing-impaired students, Ss made more errors with the straight-sided than with the curve-sided containers. Males performed better than females on…

Fifteen aphasic and 15 normal adults demonstrated use of a right hemisphere visuospatial strategy to analyze printed whole words and word parts such as prefixes and suffixes. The performances of the two groups were similar, suggesting that the hypothesized strategy could be useful as a reading approach for aphasics. (Author/CL)

The models of standard test theory, having evolved under a trait-oriented psychology, do not reflect the knowledge structures and the problem-solving strategies now seen as central to understanding performance and learning. In some applications, however, key qualitative distinctions among persons as to structures and strategies can be expressed…

Concludes that children, as well as adults, are able to expand or contract the breadth of their attentional focus in accordance with task demands. Suggests there is a developmental change in the efficiency with which a stimulus presented in an otherwise empty field can be located. (Author/RH)