Examined visual search for compound patterns in 6-, 8-, 10-, and 22-year-olds. Found large improvements with age in search rate for long-range targets; search rate for short-range targets was fairly constant across age. This pattern held regardless of ease of perceptual access to target, supporting the hypothesis of different processes involved at…

Illustrates the use of a course focused on developing 3-D spatial skills at Michigan Technological University. Provides data to support the recommendation that some students take the spatial skills course before enrolling in the regular engineering graphics courses. (DDR)

Investigates the effectiveness of using trimetric pictorials instead of isometric pictorials on the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test - Visualization of Rotations (Guay, 1977). Records student responses and response times as well as information on gender, current major, and number of previous graphics courses completed. (Contains 18 references.)…

Compared performance of 9-year-olds with arithmetic difficulties to that of age-matched and ability-matched controls on 10 tasks used to assess different aspects of working memory, including subtypes of executive function. Found deficits in executive and spatial aspects of working memory that seem likely to be important factors in poor…

Explores the way children visualize three dimensional shapes. Uses nine assessment tasks involving three dimensional objects to evaluate children's abilities. Indicates that students' visualization ability can be determined and would be an important and essential element in any overall assessment of spatial development. (ASK)

Examined in four studies the predictive value of organizing locations into a systematic figure for predicting preschoolers' use of spatial relations in a mapping task. Found that seeing a dog pattern formed by search locations facilitated performance of 5-year-olds but not younger children. Verbal labels alone or adding lines to an unsystematic…

A rather consistent finding in studies of perceived (imagined) compared to actual movement in a reaching paradigm is the tendency to overestimate at midline. Explanations of such behavior have focused primarily on perceptions of postural constraints and the notion that individuals calibrate reachability in reference to multiple degrees of freedom,…

Two experiments explored the effect of linguistic input on 18-month-olds' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of support. Infants were habituated to 4 support events (i.e., one object placed on another) and were tested with a novel support and a novel containment event. Infants formed an abstract category of support (i.e.,…

Research evidence indicates that self-report imagery ability is psychometrically distinct from objective, spatial test measures. One hypothesis put forward in the literature to explain this finding is that the nature of the stimulus is important. The aim of this article was to examine the relation between spatial abilities and measures of visual…

The spatial knowledge of 18 children with spina bifida and 18 healthy control children (matched according to sex, age, and verbal IQ) was investigated in a computer-simulated environment. All children had to learn a route through a virtual floor system containing 18 landmarks. Controlling for cognitive abilities, the results revealed that children…

Studies of neurological patients with category-specific agnosia have provided important contributions to our understanding of object recognition, although the meaning of such disorders is still hotly debated. One crucial line of research for our understanding of category effects, is through the examination of category biases in healthy normal…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder that results in severe visual-spatial cognitive deficits coupled with relative sparing in language, face recognition, and certain aspects of motion processing. Here, we look for evidence for sparing or impairment in another cognitive system--object recognition. Children with WS, normal mental-age…

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how cognitive and measurement principles can be integrated to create an essentially unidimensional test. Two studies were conducted. In Study 1, test questions were created by using the feature integration theory of attention to develop a cognitive model of performance and then manipulating complexity…

"The Mozart effect" originally referred to the phenomenon of a brief enhancement of spatial-temporal abilities in college students after listening to a Mozart piano sonata (K. 448). Over time, this term was conflated with an independent series of studies on the effects of music instruction. This occurrence has caused confusion that has been…

Humans see whole objects from input fragmented in space and time, yet spatiotemporal object perception is poorly understood. The authors propose the theory of spatiotemporal relatability (STR), which describes the visual information and processes that allow visible fragments revealed at different times and places, due to motion and occlusion, to…