Spatial memory is important for supporting the successful completion of everyday activities and is a particularly vulnerable domain in late life. Grouping items together in memory, or chunking, can improve spatial memory performance. In memory for desktop scale spaces and well-learned large-scale environments, error patterns suggest that…

The present study examined whether scaling direction and perceptual modality affect children's spatial scaling. Children aged 6-8 years (N = 201) were assigned to a visual, visuo-haptic, and haptic condition in which they were presented with colourful, embossed graphics. In the haptic condition, they were asked to wear a blindfold during the test…

Unlike children's early ability to navigate by continuous boundaries, their ability to extract geometric information from an array of objects emerges gradually over childhood. To investigate children's developing representation of object arrays for navigation and its relation to their mental representation of the global spatial layout,…

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical…

Relying on shared tasks and stimuli to conduct research can enhance the replicability of findings and allow a community of researchers to collect large data sets across multiple experiments. This approach is particularly relevant for experiments in spatial navigation, which often require the development of unfamiliar large-scale virtual…

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…

Comprehending 3D diagrams is critical for success in scientific practice and research demonstrates that understanding of 3D geology diagrams can be improved by making predictive sketches. In mathematics, explaining erroneous examples can support learning. This study combined these approaches to better understand how to effectively support 3D…

The current study expands on previous research on gender differences and similarities in science test scores. Using three different approaches -- differential item functioning, differential distractor functioning, and decision tree analysis -- we examine a high school science assessment administered to 3,849 10th-12th graders, of whom 2,021 are…

Background: Investigating the relationship between the human body and its spatial environment is a critical component in understanding the process of acquiring spatial knowledge. However, few empirical evaluations have looked at how the visual accessibility of an environment affects spatial learning. To address this gap, this paper focuses on…

Prior work showed that infants look longer at impossible figures than possible ones, although it is unclear whether they or older children understand "impossibility." We employed a series of matching and sorting tasks with pictures and objects to evaluate children's knowledge of this dimension. In Experiment 1, nearly all children…

The metaphor of the mental number line accounts for numerous empirical effects of spatial-numerical associations. In the present study, we aimed at investigating directional spatial-numerical associations reflected by SNARC-like digit-direction and sign-direction congruency effects as well as the sign-digit compatibility effect when 6th graders…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

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)…