It is a prevailing theoretical claim that path integration is the primary means of developing global spatial representations. However, this claim is at odds with reported difficulty to develop global spatial representations of a multiscale environment using path integration. The current study tested a new hypothesis that locally similar but…

Spatial visualization skills are essential and fundamental to studying STEM subjects, and sketching is an effective way to practice those skills. One significant challenge of supporting practice using sketching questions is the vast number of possible mistakes, making it time-consuming for instructors to provide customized and actionable feedback…

The present research studied the role of the non-executive and executive components of working memory in the detection of phonological, orthographical, and grammatical spelling errors. Before performing error detection tasks, undergraduate participants completed a battery of tasks to evaluate their non-executive (verbal and visuospatial storage)…

First-year architecture students are expected to utilise visuospatial abilities to generate/construct, retain, rotate and manipulate space mentally and physically through physical and digital representations. This study of 57 female and 23 male participants was conducted to investigate first-year architecture students' visuospatial abilities by…

In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response…

Memories for spatial locations often show systematic errors toward the central value of the surrounding region. The Category Adjustment (CA) model suggests that this bias is due to a Bayesian combination of categorical and metric information, which offers an optimal solution under conditions of uncertainty (Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan,…

Previous research has examined heuristics--simplified decision-making rules-of-thumb--for geospatial reasoning. This study examined at two locations the influence of beliefs about local coastline orientation on estimated directions to local and distant places; estimates were made immediately or after fifteen seconds. This study goes beyond…

Recently, a great deal of research has demonstrated that although everyday experience is continuous in nature, it is parsed into separate events. The aim of the present study was to examine whether event structure can influence the effectiveness of cognitive control. Across 5 experiments we varied the structure of events within the AX-CPT by…

Three experiments investigated whether navigation is less efficient across boundaries than within boundaries. In an immersive virtual environment, participants learned objects' locations in a large room or a small room. Participants then pointed to the objects' original locations after physically walking a circuitous path without vision.…

The perspective-taking task is one of the most common paradigms used to study the nature of spatial memory, and better performance for certain orientations is generally interpreted as evidence of spatial representations using these reference directions. However, performance advantages can also result from the relative ease in certain…

Research on bimanual coordination of hand movements has identified several loci of bimanual interference, including interference because of programming different movement parameters or selecting different targets for the two hands. This study investigates the extent and origin of interference when participants execute bimanual actions with tools.…

Little empirical data are available concerning the cognitive abilities of gifted individuals in general and especially those who excel in mathematics. We examined visual processing abilities distinguishing between general giftedness (G) and excellence in mathematics (EM). The research population consisted of 190 students from four groups of 10th-…

Formal algebras are among the most powerful and general mechanisms for expressing quantitative relational statements; yet, even university engineering students, who are relatively proficient with algebraic manipulation, struggle with and often fail to correctly deploy basic aspects of algebraic notation (Clement, 1982). In the cognitive tradition,…

Four experiments examined the roles of extended surfaces and the number of points in the boundary superiority effect in goal localization. Participants learned the locations of 4 objects in the presence of a boundary, landmarks, or both in an immersive virtual environment by reproducing the locations with feedback. Participants then localized the…

We investigated how humans encode large-scale spatial environments using a virtual taxi game. We hypothesized that if 2 connected neighborhoods are explored jointly, people will form a single integrated spatial representation of the town. However, if the neighborhoods are first learned separately and later observed to be connected, people will…