Suppose a red laser beam (of wavelength ? equal to 0.660 µm) is expanded using an optical telescope into a collimated, approximately plane wave that is 5.68 mm in diameter. Pass that beam through a tall rectangular slit whose width "a" is gradually reduced from 3.30 to 0.100 mm. Look at its image on a screen located at a distance…

We examined the effect of local or global processing bias (in the Navon task) on the acquisition of spatial knowledge from maps and route videos. Before spatial learning, participants completed a 5-min Navon task (biased toward global or local stimuli). After participants studied a map or route video, route knowledge was measured using a route…

Introduction: Individuals with visual impairments may use long canes for estimating distances and detecting gaps, obstacles, and texture patterns. The study presented here investigated whether length perception with canes is influenced by cane material. Methods: Visually impaired, sightedblindfolded, and sighted individuals (n = 30 for each group)…

Background: Angelman syndrome (AS) leads to clinical manifestations that include intellectual impairments, developmental delay and poor motor function. Initiatives to develop therapeutics imply an urgent need to identify methods that accurately measure the motor abilities. Methods: Six children with AS (6 to 9 years old) walked on an instrumented…

Science courses employ instructional strategies that are based on lecture, drill, and practice to help students memorize collections of facts and procedures of increasing complexity. These strategies emphasize the acquisition of knowledge through the development of logical-mathematical skills employed in problem solving and verbal-linguistic…

Mathematics in Australia specifies spatial reasoning as a general capability within the curriculum. However, psychological research to date limits spatial assessment to psychometric tests leaving little room for a well-defined spatial curriculum. Although there are clear relationships between mathematics and spatial thinking, the independence in…

Spatial ability represents our ability to mentally arrange, rotate, and explore objects in multiple dimensions. This ability has been found to be important for engineers and engineering students. Past research has shown that many interventions can be created to boost an individual's spatial ability. In fact, past research has indicated that…

Neurotypical individuals display a leftward attentional bias, called pseudoneglect, for physical space (e.g. landmark task) and mental representations of space (e.g. mental number line bisection). However, leftward bias is reduced in autistic individuals viewing faces, and neurotypical individuals with autistic traits viewing "greyscale"…

In the real word, we perceive our environment as a series of static and dynamic views, with viewpoint transitions providing a natural link from one static view to the next. The current research examined if experiencing such transitions is fundamental to learning the spatial layout of small-scale displays. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a…

This article describes how Charles Lovitt found a classroom activity in a resource book and by peering through a pedagogy lens, enhanced, tweaked, adapted, and extended the idea into a richer, healthier, well balanced classroom lesson. The task described in the article is often presented to students as a flash card for a limited time with the…

Recall of remembered locations reliably reflects a compromise between a target's true position and its region's prototypical position. The effect is quite robust, and a standard interpretation for these data is that the metric and categorical codings blend in a Bayesian combinatory fashion. However, there has been no direct experimental evidence…

Sleep is thought to preferentially consolidate hippocampus-dependent memory, and as such, spatial navigation. Here, we investigated the effects of sleep on route knowledge and explicit and implicit semantic regions in a virtual environment. Sleep, compared with wakefulness, improved route knowledge and also enhanced awareness of the semantic…

Spatial intelligence concerns the locations of objects, their shapes, their relations, and the paths they take as they move. Recognition of spatial skills enriches the traditional educational focus on developing literacy and numerical skills to include a cognitive domain particularly relevant to achievement in science, technology, engineering and…

We report here a study of spatial learning and action videogame play based on Feng et al.'s (2007) finding that 10 hours spent playing an action videogame significantly improved selective attention and mental rotation. Students with above-average scores on measures of spatial abilities, such as mental rotation, prove more successful in Science,…

Undergraduate calculus is a foundational mathematics sequence that previews the sophistication students will need to succeed in higher-level courses. However, students often struggle with concepts in calculus because they are more abstract and visual than those in other foundational mathematics courses. Additionally, women continue to be…