Studied the effects of peer collaboration on the acquisition of the understanding that water remains invariantly horizontal. Results from 69 female and 22 male college students show that peer collaboration did not lead to greater understanding than working alone, but that men and women talked about the problem differently and that the use of…

Discusses issues related to delivering spatially oriented data to the general public, since communication through computer graphics should be accessible to the masses as well as to specialists. The second half of the paper describes the Purdue University Virtual Visit, a resource being used for visualization and communication at Purdue University…

Presents a study reviewing the importance of spatial ability to biology achievement and demonstrates a spatial enhancement that presents content while improving an important aspect of spatial ability, flexibility of closure. (Contains 31 references.) (ASK)

Five experiments tested hypothesis that the A-not-B error results from general processes that make goal-directed actions to remembered locations. Findings showed that 2-year-olds' performance on the A trial was accurate. When the object was hidden at Location B, searches after 10-second delay were biased in the direction of Location A. This bias…

Used a dual-task method to study the processes that underlie the flexible conjunction of information. Results of four experiments, involving 16, 36, 12, and 16 college students and adults suggest that flexible spatial memory depends on the ability to combine diverse information sources rapidly into unitary representations. (SLD)

Explains the importance of spatial visualization skills in engineering and women's lack of 3-D spatial skills. Introduces a special course designed to enhance 3-D spatial skills as they relate to the retention and overall success of female engineering students. (Contains 25 references.) (Author/YDS)

Values the use of a contextualized poster in which the images are more important than the actual words. Confirms this through an analysis of a questionnaire handed out to a sample of 'English for Specific Purposes' students. Addresses the pedagogical implications that the use of a poster has proved to have with a multidisciplinary group of…

The basic task of educational theory is to ground education in the being of children and youth. Education, however, is a very broad domain, consisting of four major problem areas: (1) the nature and aim of education; (2) the organisation of instruction and school policy; (3) the design and content of the curriculum; and (4) the teaching and…

The cube imitation test was developed by Knox (1913) as a nonverbal test of intelligence. Many variants show satisfactory reliability, but performance is correlated both with Verbal IQ and with Performance IQ. Performance is impaired by cerebral lesions but unrelated to the side of lesion. Examinees describe both verbal and visuospatial…

In four experiments the behavioral consequences of an involuntary attentional distraction concerning memory performance was investigated. The working memory model of Cowan (1995) predicts a performance deficit for memory representations that are held in an active state when the focus of attention is distracted by a change in physical properties.…

Among the sciences, the practice of geology is especially visual. To assess the role of spatial ability in learning geology, we designed an experiment using: (1) web-based versions of spatial visualization tests, (2) a geospatial test, and (3) multimedia instructional modules built around QuickTime Virtual Reality movies. Students in control and…

It has become increasingly common for theories to rely on a constraint that 1 object cannot be in more than 1 place at the same time. Analysis suggests that a 1 object--1 place--1 time constraint as literally stated is false, that a modified constraint is biased toward the visual modality, that it may not be a correct description of the physical…

Previous studies have suggested that face identification is more sensitive to variations in spatial frequency content than object recognition, but none have compared how sensitive the 2 processes are to variations in spatial frequency overlap (SFO). The authors tested face and object matching accuracy under varying SFO conditions. Their results…

The authors propose that there are 2 different mechanisms whereby spatial cues capture attention. The voluntary mechanism is the strategic allocation of perceptual resources to the location most likely to contain the target. The involuntary mechanism is a reflexive orienting response that occurs even when the spatial cue does not indicate the…

Models of attentional control usually describe online shifts in control settings that accommodate changing task demands. The current studies suggest that online control over distractor exclusion--a core component of visual selection--can be accomplished without online shifts in top-down settings. Measurements of target discrimination accuracy…