It is essential to recognize the strengths and talents of autistic individuals. Previous studies of extraordinary talents (i.e. skills that stand out relative to the general population) have combined individuals with different skills (e.g. calendrical calculation, drawing) into one group. There has been limited investigation of talents in specific…

The ability to rotate visual mental images is a complex cognitive skill. It requires the building of graphical libraries of information through short or long term memory systems and the subsequent retrieval and manipulation of these towards a specified goal. The development of mental rotation skill is of critical importance within engineering…

Distinctiveness effects in children's (5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds) false memory illusions were examined using visual materials. In Experiment 1, developmental trends (increasing false memories with age) were obtained using Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists presented as words and color photographs but not line drawings. In Experiment 2, when items were…

This paper surveys some major trends from research on visual and spatial thinking coming from cognitive science, developmental psychology, science literacy, and science studies. It explores the role of visualisation in creativity, in building mental models, and in the communication of scientific ideas, in order to place these findings in the…

Young children find meaning in the drawings they create that may not be apparent to an adult observer. The purpose of this study is to access the children's views using a drawing change task. Seventy-three pre-schoolers were asked to draw a person and then draw a person with a belly button. It was anticipated that tadpole (no separate body)…

Previous literature on children's visual pattern perception has suggested that preschool children may process hierarchical forms in a manner different from that of older children and adults. Data from some studies suggested that children are holistic processors of pattern information, while other studies characterized children as piecemeal…

From this study of kindergarten children, the author concludes that drawing should be recognized as an important educational activity that helps children to learn and remember the visual characteristics of the figures they draw, and that it does so more effectively than does mere observation or tracing of those figures. (Author/SJL)

This study involved fifty-eight 3-year-olds. It sought to determine whether the preschoolers could learn to discriminate visually the critical elements of shape through a program of perceptual-motor training, transfer such knowledge to similar but different shapes, and then resist the process of forgetting the critical elements. The children were…