The paper addresses the capabilities and limitations of extrafoveal processing during a categorical visual search. Previous research has established that a target could be identified from the very first or without any saccade, suggesting that extrafoveal perception is necessarily involved. However, the limits in complexity defining the processed…

Spatial reasoning is critical across the STEM disciplines. Examining deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children's spatial reasoning in mathematics, particularly geometry, as an embodied phenomenon opens new possibilities for deaf education. The authors inquire into the embodied processes and forms of DHH learners' spatial reasoning, considering how…

Paper folding studies are quite effective in the development of students' visual and spatial skills. The "paper" used in these studies is a genuine tool that can support the development of geometric habits of mind as well as the visual-spatial skills. This is an action research aimed to investigate the potential of paper folding to…

We compared two contrasting hypotheses of how multifeatured objects are stored in visual working memory (vWM); as integrated objects or as independent features. A new procedure was devised to examine vWM representations of several concurrently held objects and their features and our main measure was reaction time (RT), allowing an examination of…

In light of the adult model of a hemispheric asymmetry of global and local processing, we compared children (M [subscript age] = 8.4 years) to adults in a global-local reaction time (RT) paradigm. Hierarchical designs (large shapes made of small shapes) were presented randomly to each visual field, and participants were instructed to identify…

Mental rotation is an important spatial processing ability and an important element in intelligence tests. However, the majority of past attempts at training mental rotation have used paper-and-pencil tests or digital images. This study proposes an innovative mental rotation training approach using magnetic motion controllers to allow learners to…

The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a computationally difficult combinatorial optimization problem. In spite of its relative difficulty, human solvers are able to generate close-to-optimal solutions in a close-to-linear time frame, and it has been suggested that this is due to the visual system's inherent sensitivity to certain geometric…

While perceiving speech, people see mouth shapes that are systematically associated with sounds. In particular, a vertically stretched mouth produces a /woo/ sound, whereas a horizontally stretched mouth produces a /wee/ sound. We demonstrate that hearing these speech sounds alters how we see aspect ratio, a basic visual feature that contributes…

Mental-rotation ability modestly predicts chemistry achievement. As such, sex differences in mental-rotation ability have been implicated as a causal factor that can explain sex differences in chemistry achievement and degree attainment. Although there is a correlation between mental-rotation ability and chemistry achievement, laboratory and field…

How does executive attentional control contribute to memory for sequences of visual objects, and what does this reveal about storage and processing in working memory? Three experiments examined the impact of a concurrent executive load (backward counting) on memory for sequences of individually presented visual objects. Experiments 1 and 2 found…

Research on naive physics and naive optics have shown that people hold surprising beliefs about everyday phenomena that are in contrast with what they see. In this article, we investigated what adults expect to be the field of view of a mirror from various viewpoints. The studies presented here confirm that humans have difficulty dealing with the…

The present study investigated (a) whether the perceived cognitive load was different when geometry problems with various levels of configuration comprehension were solved and (b) whether eye movements in comprehending geometry problems showed sources of cognitive loads. In the first investigation, three characteristics of geometry configurations…

The "other-race" effect describes the phenomenon in which faces are difficult to distinguish from one another if they belong to an ethnic or racial group to which the observer has had little exposure. Adult observers typically display multiple forms of recognition error for other-race faces, and infants exhibit behavioral evidence of a developing…

We present novel evidence showing that new self-relevant visual associations can affect performance in simple shape recognition tasks. Participants associated labels for themselves, other people, or neutral terms with geometric shapes and then immediately judged whether subsequent label-shape pairings were matched. Across 4 experiments there was a…

Sensitivity to shape changes was measured, in particular detection of convexity and concavity changes. The available data are contradictory. The author used a change detection task and simple polygons to systematically manipulate convexity/concavity. Performance was high for detecting a change of sign (a new concave vertex along a convex contour…