Presents mathematics activities focusing on explorations in the environment that include visual or geometric components. (ASK)

Investigated whether environmental factors affected the magnitude of gender differences in spatial performance when tasks were susceptible to the influence of such factors. Evaluation of college students indicated that males outperformed females on two spatial tests. Activities preference in childhood affected the magnitude of gender differences…

This study examined recognition memory for items and their location among adults with Down syndrome (n=24), adults with nonspecific mental retardation (n=22), and community volunteers (n=20). No differences in memory for spatial location were found between the two groups with mental retardation, though both groups performed worse than control…

Presents a case study that aimed to obtain information on students' mathematical comprehension levels and on whether students may or may not make use of visualization processes in solving mathematical problems. Discovers students' beliefs about teaching and learning processes in general, and mathematics in particular. (Contains 25 references.)…

Asks whether different scoring systems can explain why many studies have found female failures in performing tasks that were designed to assess concepts of horizontality and verticality. Presents new findings involving 86 men and boys and 84 women and girls through which no significant sex differences were found. Discusses suggestions and…

Investigates the effects of using molecular modeling on students' spatial ability, understanding of new concepts related to geometric and symbolic representations, and perception of the model concept. (Author/CCM)

The future of test construction for certain psychological ability domains that can be analyzed well in a structured manner may lie--at the very least for reasons of test security--in the field of automatic item generation. In this context, a question that has not been explicitly addressed is whether it is possible to embed an item response theory…

Two new measures to assess spatial ability are presented: the mental cutting test "Schnitte" (Fay & Quaiser-Pohl, 1999; English version: Fay, Quaiser-Pohl, & Ronicke, 2003), a test for selecting people with extraordinary spatial abilities, and the Picture Rotation Test (Hinze, 2002; Hinze & Quaiser-Pohl, 2003), a mental rotation test for preschool…

The aim of this article is to show that individuals differ in the way they solve spatial tasks of all kinds, and both research on and measurement of spatial ability could profit from an integration of strategy aspects. We first review evidence for both intra- and inter-individual strategy differences (including gender differences) in 3 domains of…

When 2 targets for pursuit eye movements move in different directions, the eye velocity follows the vector average (S. G. Lisberger & V. P. Ferrera, 1997). The present study investigates the mechanisms of target selection when observers are instructed to follow a predefined horizontal target and to ignore a moving distractor stimulus. Results show…

Sign languages modulate the production of signs in space and use this spatial modulation to refer back to entities--to maintain coreference. We ask here whether spatial modulation is so fundamental to language in the manual modality that it will be invented by individuals asked to create gestures on the spot. English speakers were asked to…

The gender role hypothesis posits that performance on a cognitive ability test is influenced by whether the test instructions frame the test as measuring a skill that is consistent or inconsistent with the test taker's gender role beliefs. The Bem sex role inventory was used to measure the gender role of female college students, and the group…

Attentional allocation in feature-search mode (W. F. Bacon & H. E. Egeth, 1994) is thought to be solely determined by top-down factors, with no role for stimulus-driven salience. The authors reassessed this conclusion using variants of the spatial cuing and rapid serial visual presentation paradigms developed by C. L. Folk and colleagues (C. L.…

We test 3 theories of global and local scene information acquisition, defining global and local in terms of spatial frequencies. By independence theories, high- and low-spatial-frequency information are acquired over the same time course and combine additively. By global-precedence theories, global information acquisition precedes local…

In 4 experiments, the author explored the spontaneous construction of spatial situation models during discourse comprehension by using the sentence-recognition paradigm of J. D. Bransford, J. R. Barclay, and J. J. Franks (1972). In Experiment 1, signaling causal relevance of spatial relations was a necessary precondition for replicating their…