Dynamic tasks often require fast adaptations to new viewpoints. It has been shown that automatic spatial updating is triggered by proprioceptive motion cues. Here, we demonstrate that purely visual cues are sufficient to trigger automatic updating. In five experiments, we examined spatial updating in a dynamic attention task in which participants…

When body movements are stored in memory in an organized manner, linked to a common retrieval cue like the effector with which to execute the movement, interference may arise as soon as one initiates the execution of a specific body movement in the presence of the retrieval cue because related motor programs also are activated. We investigated the…

Previous research indicates children reason in different ways about horizontal motion and motion in fall. At the same time, their understanding of motion down inclines appears to result from an interaction between horizontal and vertical motion understanding. However, this interaction is still poorly understood. Understanding of speed change may…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have native exposure to a sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) have received almost no scientific attention. This paper reports the first studies on a sample of five native-signing children (four deaf children of deaf parents and one hearing child of deaf parents; ages 4;6 to 7;5)…

Humans have an evolved embodied cognition that equips them to deal easily with the natural movements of object manipulations. Hence, learning a manipulative task is generally more effective when watching animations that show natural motions of the task, rather than equivalent static pictures. The present study was completed to explore this…

In mathematic courses, construction of some concepts by the students in a meaningful way may be complicated. In such circumstances, to embody the concepts application of the required technologies may reinforce learning process. Onset of learning process over daily life events of the student's environment may lure their attention and may…

When people describe motion events, their path expressions are biased toward inclusion of goal paths (e.g., into the house) and omission of source paths (e.g., out of the house). In this paper, we explored whether this asymmetry has its origins in people's non-linguistic representations of events. In three experiments, 4-year-old children and…

Kinematic recordings in a reach and drop task were compared between 12 preschool children with autism without mental retardation and 12 gender and age-matched normally developing children. Our aim was to investigate whether motor anomalies in autism may depend more on a planning ability dysfunction or on a motor control deficit. Planning and…

Cognitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation,…

Imitation deficits observed among individuals with autism could be partly explained by the excessive speed of biological movements to be perceived and then reproduced. Along with this assumption, slowing down the speed of presentation of these movements might improve their imitative performances. To test this hypothesis, 19 children with autism,…

The delayed discrimination methodology has been used to demonstrate a high-fidelity nondecaying visual short-term memory (VSTM) for so-called preattentive basic features. In the current Study, I show that the nondecaying high VSTM precision is not restricted to basic features by using the same method to measure memory precision for gait direction…

Mariners actively adjust their body orientation in response to ship motion. On a ship at sea, we evaluated relations between standing postural activity and the performance of a precision aiming task. Standing participants (experienced mariners) maintained the beam from a handheld laser on a target. Targets were large or small, thereby varying the…

This study examined the relationships among visuospatial ability, motivation to learn science, and learner conceptions of force across commonly measured demographics with university undergraduates with the aim of examining the support for an evolved sense of force and motion. Demographic variables of interest included age, ethnicity, and gender,…

An important issue for understanding visual perception in autism concerns whether individuals with this neurodevelopmental disorder possess an advantage in processing local visual information, and if so, what is the nature of this advantage. Perception of movement speed is a visual process that relies on computation of local spatiotemporal signals…

The present study was conducted to examine the relationship between expertise in movement correction and rate of movement reprogramming within limited time periods, and to clarify the specific cognitive processes regarding superior reprogramming ability in experts. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in baseball experts (n = 7) and…