The goals of this study were to explore the deficits in working memory associated with literacy disorders (i.e. developmental disorders of reading and/or spelling) and the developmental trajectories of these working memory deficits. The performance of 28 children with literacy disorders was compared to a non-disabled control group with the same…

The ability to connect numbers and magnitudes is an important prerequisite for math learning, here referred to as number-magnitude skills. It has been proposed that working memory plays an important role in constructing these connections. The aim of the current study was to examine if working memory accounts for constructing these connections by…

Recent results from Vo and Wolfe (2012b) suggest that the application of memory to visual search may be task specific: Previous experience searching for an object facilitated later search for that object, but object information acquired during a different task did not appear to transfer to search. The latter inference depended on evidence that a…

When we look at a scene, we are conscious of only a small fraction of the available visual information at any given point in time. This raises profound questions regarding how information is selected, when awareness occurs, and the nature of the mechanisms underlying these processes. One tool that may be used to probe these issues is…

Background: Evidence exists that there are two main underlying cognitive factors in mathematical difficulties: working memory and number sense. It is suggested that real math difficulties appear when both working memory and number sense are weak, here referred to as the double deficit (DD) hypothesis. Aims: The aim of this study was to test the DD…

Previous research has illustrated the unique benefits of three-dimensional (3-D) Virtual Reality (VR) technology in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) children. This study examined the use of 3-D VR technology as an assessment tool in ASD children, and further compared its use to two-dimensional (2-D) tasks. Additionally, we aimed to examine…

This report examines effects of the spatial complexity of configurations on visual short-term memory (VSTM) capacity for individuals from the general population differing on autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) scores. During each trial, nine-line segments with various orientations were arrayed in simple or complex configurations and presented in both…

Earlier research showed that visuospatial working memory (VSWM) is better preserved in Down syndrome (DS) than verbal WM. Some differences emerged, however, when VSWM performance was broken down into its various components, and more recent studies revealed that the spatial-simultaneous component of VSWM is more impaired than the spatial-sequential…

Previous studies have shown that deficiencies in visuospatial perception and semantic processing in people with Williams syndrome (WS) are due to deficient central cohesiveness. Unlike previous studies that used abstract stimuli, this study used pictures to determine the relative ability of people with WS to integrate contextual information with…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have been assumed to show evidence of abnormal visuospatial processing, which has been attributed to a failure to integrate local features into coherent global Gestalts and/or to a bias towards local processing. As the available data are based on baseline performance only, which does not provide…

The development of the Visual-Perceptual Chemistry Specific (VPCS) assessment tool is based on items that align to eight visual-perceptual skills considered as needed by chemistry students. This tool includes a comprehensive range of visual operations and presents items within a chemistry context without requiring content knowledge to solve…

Since subthreshold autistic social impairments aggregate in family members, and since attentional dysfunctions appear to be one of the earliest cognitive markers of children with autism, we investigated in the general population the relationship between infants' attentional functioning and the autistic traits measured in their parents.…

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…

What can be extracted as a common definition amongst near 100 different definitions of creativity according to different disciplines is: Creativity is a new combination of what you have in your inventory of experiences + intuition. It can be considered that expanding the inventory of experiences can gradually help in novel combination of…

Selective attention in multidimensional displays has usually been examined using search tasks requiring the detection of a single target. We examined the ability to perceive a spatial structure in multi-item subsets of a display that were defined either conjunctively or disjunctively. Observers saw two adjacent displays and indicated whether the…