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We often assume that travel direction is redundant with head direction, but from first principles, these two factors provide differing spatial information. Although head direction has been found to be a fundamental component of human navigation, it is unclear how self-motion signals for travel direction contribute to forming a travel trajectory. Employing a novel motion adaptation paradigm from visual neuroscience designed to preclude a contribution of head direction, we found high-level aftereffects of perceived travel direction, indicating that travel direction is a fundamental component of human navigation. Interestingly, we discovered a higher frequency of reporting perceived travel toward the adapted direction compared to a no-adapt control-an aftereffect that runs contrary to low-level motion aftereffects. This travel aftereffect was maintained after controlling for possible response biases and approaching effects, and it scaled with adaptation duration. These findings demonstrate the first evidence of how a pure travel direction signal might be represented in humans, independent of head direction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Manual Reaction Time measures have been widely used to study interactions between perceptual, cognitive, and motor functions. The Stimulus-Response Compatibility is a phenomenon characterized through faster Manual Reaction Times when stimuli and response locations coincide (correspondent condition) than when they are on different sides (noncorrespondent condition). The present study adapted a protocol to study if the Stimulus-Response Compatibility effect can be detected during a virtual combat simulation. Twenty-seven participants were instructed to defend themselves by clicking a key in order to block the presented punch. Videos of two fighters were used, granting two types of basic strokes: the back fist, a punch performed with the dorsal part of the fighter's hand, starting at the opposite side to which it is directed; and the hook punch, performed with a clenched fist starting and finishing ipsilaterally. The Manual Reaction Times were different between the correspondent and noncorrespondent conditions. F(1, 26) = 9.925; p < .004; η² = .276. with an Stimulus-Response Compatibility effect of 72 ms. Errors were also different, F(1, 26) = 23.199; p < .001; η² = .472. between the correspondent (13%) and the noncorrespondent conditions (23%). The study concluded that spatial codes presented at the beginning of the punch movement perception substantially influenced the response execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial thinking skills are associated with performance, persistence, and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) school subjects. Because STEM knowledge and skills are integral to developing a well-trained workforce within and beyond STEM, spatial skills have become a major focus of cognitive, developmental, and educational research. However, these efforts are greatly hampered by the current lack of access to reliable, valid, and well-normed spatial tests. Although there are hundreds of spatial tests, they are often hard to access and use, and information about their psychometric properties is frequently lacking. Additional problems include (1) substantial disagreement about what different spatial tests measure-even two tests with similar names may measure very different constructs; (2) the inability to measure some STEM-relevant spatial skills by any existing tests; and (3) many tests only being available for specific age groups. The first part of this report delineates these problems, as documented in a series of structured and open-ended interviews and surveys with colleagues. The second part outlines a roadmap for addressing the problems. We present possibilities for developing shared testing systems that would allow researchers to test many participants through the internet. We discuss technological innovations, such as virtual reality, which could facilitate the testing of navigation and other spatial skills. Developing a bank of testing resources will empower researchers and educators to explore and support spatial thinking in their disciplines, as well as drive the development of a comprehensive and coherent theoretical understanding of spatial thinking.

A putative male advantage in wayfinding ability is the most widely documented sex difference in human cognition and has also been observed in other animals. The common interpretation, the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis, posits that this male advantage evolved as an adaptive response to sex differences in home range size. A previous study a decade ago tested this hypothesis by comparing sex differences in home range size and spatial ability among 11 species and found no relationship. However, the study was limited by the small sample size, the lack of species with a larger female home range and the lack of non-Western human data. The present study represents an update that addresses all of these limitations, including data from 10 more species and from human subsistence cultures. Consistent with the previous result, we found little evidence that sex differences in spatial navigation and home range size are related. We conclude that sex differences in spatial ability are more likely due to experiential factors and/or unselected biological side effects, rather than functional outcomes of natural selection.

Spatial cognition is fundamental to human behavior, but people differ in how they remember spatial relations, variably using body-based (egocentric) and environment-based (allocentric) spatial reference frames. Despite decades of study, the causes of this variation and flexibility in spatial memory remain unclear. Here we show that people spontaneously use different reference frames on different spatial axes at the same time. When remembering the placement of a target object in a 2-dimensional array, Indigenous Tsimane' adults preferentially used allocentric space to determine lateral placement and egocentric space to determine sagittal placement in the same action. This effect of axis was also significant among US university students, whose overall preference for egocentric space was stronger on the sagittal than lateral axis. These findings support a novel account of spatial cognitive diversity and suggest that people across cultures habitually integrate egocentric and allocentric spatial reference frames into the same action.

A wealth of evidence indicates that children use their developing linguistic knowledge to incrementally interpret speech and predict upcoming reference to objects. For verbs, determiners, case-markers, and adjectives, hearing linguistic information that sufficiently constrains referent choice leads to anticipatory eye-movements. There is, however, limited evidence about whether children also use spatial prepositions predictively. This is surprising and theoretically important: spatial prepositions provide abstract semantic information that must interface with spatial properties of, and relations between, objects in the world. Making this connection may develop late because of the complex mapping required. In a visual-world eye-tracking task, we find that adults and 4-year-olds hearing 'inside' (but not 'near') look predictively to objects that afford the property of containment. We conclude that children make predictions about the geometric properties of objects from spatial terms that specify these properties, suggesting real-time use of language to guide analysis of objects in the visual world.

Exploration in sequential decision problems is a computationally challenging problem. Yet, animals exhibit effective exploration strategies, discovering shortcuts and efficient routes toward rewarding sites. Characterizing this efficiency in animal exploration is an important goal in many areas of research, from ecology to psychology and neuroscience to machine learning. In this study, we aim to understand the exploration behavior of animals freely navigating a complex maze with many decision points. We propose an algorithm based on a few simple principles of animal movement from foraging studies in ecology and formalized using reinforcement learning. Our approach not only captures the search efficiency and turning biases of real animals but also uncovers longer spatial and temporal dependencies in the decisions of animals during their exploration of the maze. Through this work, we aspire to unveil a novel approach in cognitive science of drawing interdisciplinary inspiration to advancing the field's understanding of complex decision-making.

What impacts what we remember about objects we have just encountered? Influential theories of learning suggest that more active engagement leads to stronger memories than passive observation. However, it is not clear which aspects of interaction lead to stronger memories, nor what kinds of memories are supported by active engagement. Here we conduct several experiments to investigate the impact of assembling an object on subsequent recognition and recall performance. We found that reconstructing a block tower by copying it part-by-part could impair subsequent memory for that tower, compared to passively viewing that tower. By contrast, when participants initially encoded each tower by building it from working memory, their subsequent recall was enhanced relative to when they held the tower in working memory without building it. Together our results suggest a complex relationship between the nature of our interactions with objects and our subsequent memories of them.

While Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) are promising for modelling spatial cognition, their application is currently limited to artificially generated images and simple spatial queries. We propose VSA4VQA – a novel 4D implementation of VSAs that implements a mental representation of natural images for the challenging task of Visual Question Answering (VQA). VSA4VQA is the first model to scale a VSA to complex spatial queries. Our method is based on the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) to encode objects in a hyperdimensional vector space. To encode natural images, we extend the SPA to include dimensions for object's width and height in addition to their spatial location. To perform spatial queries we further introduce learned spatial query masks and integrate a pre-trained vision-language model for answering attribute-related questions. We evaluate our method on the GQA benchmark dataset and show that it can effectively encode natural images, achieving competitive performance to state-of-the-art deep learning methods for zero-shot VQA.

The cognitive processes underlying mental folding have been investigated for decades, while the neural correlates associated with this spatial transformation are barely understood. This study combines cognitive modeling with EEG recordings from 41 subjects to investigate the general mechanisms of mental spatial transformation. By linking model-based simulation and electrocortical activity, we identified brain areas involved during mental folding. Our novel approach showed active central parietal and left parietal, as well as occipital areas during spatial storage, while the right parietal cortex was associated with spatial transformation. The left occipital and parietal regions were active especially during visual baseline trials, while the right parietal region exhibited stronger activity for more difficult folding trials, replicating previous results. The varying activation patterns imply different cognitive loads for storage and for transformation depending on task difficulty.

Construal Level Theory (CLT) suggests that we represent objects close to us in a concrete and modal fashion, and that representations become more abstract and amodal with increasing distance from ourselves. Evidence for such an association of abstraction level and distance comes from the Implicit Association Test (IAT), where participants are faster when pressing one key for “near” and “concrete” and another key for “far” and “abstract” targets (congruent), than when “near” is paired with “abstract” and “far” with “concrete” (incongruent). However, previous experiments might have confounded distance and abstraction by employing inherently near and far targets (e.g., CHAIR vs. SUN) that might also differ in their abstractness. Here, we thus experimentally induced different distances in a learning phase before a subsequent IAT task. Even with this controlled distance manipulation, a pronounced congruency effect emerged, providing further support for an association of distance and abstraction level as suggested by CLT.

Infants learn actively in their environments, shaping their own learning curricula. They learn about their environments' affordances, that is, how local circumstances determine how their behavior can affect the environment. Here we model this type of behavior by means of a deep learning architecture. The architecture mediates between global cognitive map exploration and local affordance learning. Inference processes actively move the simulated agent towards regions where they expect affordance-related knowledge gain. We contrast three measures of uncertainty to guide this exploration: predicted uncertainty of a model, standard deviation between the means of several models (SD), and the Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) between several models. We show that the first measure gets fooled by aleatoric uncertainty inherent in the envi- ronment, while the two other measures focus learning on epistemic uncertainty. JSD exhibits the most balanced exploration strategy. From a computational perspective, our model suggests three key ingredients for coordinating the active generation of learning curricula: (1) Navigation behavior needs to be coordinated with local motor behavior for enabling active affordance learning. (2) Affordances need to be encoded locally for acquiring generalized knowledge. (3) Effective active affordance learning mechanisms should use density comparison techniques for estimating expected knowledge gain. Future work may seek collaborations with developmental psychology to model active play in children in more realistic scenarios.

In teleoperation, the spatiotemporal calibration of the system can significantly impact both performance and user experience, which may not necessarily be causally linked. This study asks if Sense of Embodiment (SoE) varies with spatiotemporal calibration of a teleoperated system, which in turn affects task performance. Most SoE studies are passive and they do not represent a great paradigm to study the impact of calibration on SoE in active teleoperation. Therefore, we designed an active RHI in mixed reality where we manipulated both the spatial calibration (shifts) and visuo-proprioceptive synchronicity (temporal delay). We investigated if this manipulation affected performance, proprioceptive mapping, SoE and the perception of the setup as a mediator. The results suggest a potential direct influence of SoE on task performance, particularly through enhanced calibration due to synchronicity, indicating potential benefits for sustained usage. Additionally, SoE is explored comprehensively, employing multiple tests assessing implicit and explicit dimensions of calibration.

Spatial cognition and spatial language are a core site for diversity, both within and across language communities. For instance, when describing motion events, speakers through speech and gesture may anchor information either (egocentrically) to their body or (allocentrically) to geographical landmarks in the environment. Here we investigate whether the use of such egocentric versus allocentric frames of reference in co-speech gesture indeed depends on both bodily and environmental axes. In a real-world experiment, members from the traditionally allocentric Balinese community were shown small-scale motion events and asked to retell them. To evaluate the potential influence of both types of axes on gestural frame of reference use, in a 2x2 between-participant design they were assigned to conditions that contrasted the body-anchored axis the motion events unfolded on with the underlying geographical environment-anchored axis. It was observed that the type of body-anchored axis significantly predicted frame of reference representation in participants' gestures, consistent with previous research. The type of environment-anchored axes, however, did not affect characteristics of participants' gestures. These findings advance our understanding of the intricate interplay between language, space, culture, and environment.

This study investigates whether linguistic influences can affect the manifestation of lateral space-valence mappings in people's minds. Although most oral languages and cultures of the world have expressions and conventions that associate the good with the right space, this association seems to be body- specific: while right-handers associate positive concepts with the right side and negative concepts with the left side, left- handers have the oppositive association, and the size of the effect of the body specificity does not vary with linguistic and cultural conventions. Thus, it is widely believed that this conceptual metaphor only depends on the body. However, sign languages do not seem to have any conventional association between lateral space and valence, and a recent study has shown that signers do not associate valence with lateral space, opening the possibility of a causal influence of language. The present study set to replicate this surprising and controversial finding by comparing a sign language group, consisting of Spanish and Chinese Sign Language users, and an oral Spanish control group on the widely applied “Bob” task in this field. Supporting prior findings, Spanish language participants associated the “good” with their dominant side of space, closely matching the anticipated proportion, but signers did not. This pattern of results can be explained by a strong linguistic influence on the formation of lateral associations of emotional valence, but we discuss some alternative possibilities.

Transcription with Incremental Presentation of the Stimulus (TIPS) is a novel approach relying on micro-behaviours proposed by Colarusso and colleagues (2023) to study users' cognition with data visualizations. The study in this paper has two primary objectives: (a) investigate whether TIPS can measure an individual's competence with data visualizations; and (b) explore the potential enhancement of TIPS measures by normalizing them with the individual's performance on tests of visuo-spatial abilities and memory capacity. We test 30 participants with different expertise and cognitive skills. Results reveal that TIPS provides some promise for individual competence assessment, but only when normalized with the individual's performance on a test of rigid transformation of mental images. Other tests measuring visuospatial abilities or memory capacity did not produce effective normalizations.

Humans can flexibly bind familiar functional roles to novel entities in their environment. For example, children who have the concept of ``goal posts'' can bind this abstract role to two hats placed on the street. In doing so, they can port over existing expectations of ``goal posts" for the duration of the game. In this paper, we seek to explore artificial agents' ability to perform flexible role binding and rebinding. To this end, we designed a Gridworld navigation game and tested a popular CNN-based agent which has had success in other tasks involving visual and spatial state spaces (e.g. Atari or Minigrid). To our surprise, we found that while this architecture was capable of overfitting to the training set, it was not able to learn flexible role binding without intervention. We ultimately show that with carefully engineered data augmentation techniques, our artificial agent is able to learn the task. This suggests that the diversity of the training dataset was a limiting factor.

Humans make sense of space in a variety of ways. We can locate the world relative to our bodies, for instance, and thus adopt an 'egocentric' frame of reference for space. Or we can locate the world relative to an external frame of reference --- the cardinal directions, perhaps, or salient geographical features such as mountains. Across contexts and cultures, people vary in the frame of reference they adopt to think and communicate about space. Here, we test an explanation of this diversity: Egocentric encoding is encouraged by dense urban environments, particularly when reasoning about small-scale space. We constructed a corpus of three decades of published studies of cross-cultural variation in spatial frames of reference (N > 7,000 participants). Multilevel Bayesian models confirmed that egocentric encoding is more common in cities (vs. rural environments) and for small-scale space. Our conceptualization of space is shaped by the spaces we inhabit.

Object Permanence (OP) is the understanding that objects continue to exist when not directly observable. To date, this ability has proven difficult to build into AI systems, with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) systems performing significantly worse than human children. Here, DRL Agents, PPO and Dreamer-v3 were tested against a number of comparators (Human children, random agents and hard coded Heuristic agents) on three object permanence tasks (OP) and a range of control tasks. As expected, the children performed well across all tasks, while performance of the DRL agents was mixed. Overallthe pattern of performance across OP and control tasks did not suggest that any agent tested except children showed evidence of robust OP.

Verbal descriptions of spatial configurations open a window to a specific aspect of visual cognition relevant to the interpretation of topological relations in the visual world. The present study reports an experimental investigation of the production of spatial prepositions by human participants while they verbally described visual stimuli within a stimuli battery commonly utilized in relevant research. The analysis of participants' eye movements revealed a relationship between the variety of spatial terms in the given language and native speakers' fixation patterns on the stimuli. A broader spectrum of spatial expressions, describing the same visual scene, is related to longer and more frequent fixations on the stimuli. The findings reflect cognitive processes, as indicated by oculomotor control variables, related to the verbal expression of spatial relationships.

Spatial abilities and their developmental trajectory are an important part of human intelligence and have been the subject of numerous studies, including mental rotation and perspective taking. However, little is known about these processes in under-represented populations. Here we report a study on 10-year-old children in such a context who participated in four spatial tasks – animal picture mental rotation, abstract figures mental rotation, memory for object location, and picture perspective taking. Results revealed no male advantage on any task, and better performance in the abstract figures task for girls following an alternative school program in mathematics. Furthermore, the analysis found no correlation between the mental rotation and perspective taking performance. Research on under-represented populations is an important drive towards greater generalizability of findings and conclusions.

In this study on the use of gesture deixis during explanations, a sample of 24 videorecorded dyadic interactions of a board game explanation was analyzed. The relation between the use of gesture deixis by different explainers and their interpretation of explainees' understanding was investigated. In addition, we describe explainers' intra-individual variations related to their interactions with three different explainees consecutively. While we did not find a relation between interpretations of explainees' complete understanding and a decrease in explainers' use of gesture deixis, we demonstrated that the overall use of gesture deixis is related to the process of interactional monitoring and the attendance of a different explainee.

We describe the verbs pursue, chase, and follow as “tracking” verbs because they share conceptual similarities: they are all motion verbs that describe a dynamic spatial relation between two entities, as in “the cat chased the mouse”. What distinguishes them from one another? If, as some cognitive scientists argue, mental simulations underlie the way the mind processes all motion verbs — including those that describe static scenarios, such as run in “the road runs through the desert” — then those simulations may explain the differences between tracking verbs. For instance, chase and pursue may describe conceptually faster motion than follow. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments. The studies presented participants with imagery of one car chasing another along a straight road. In Experiment 1, participants estimated the distance that the pursued car would travel 3 seconds into the future by dragging a slider to an appropriate point on the road. In Experiment 2, participants estimated the distance by selecting from several distance options on a logarithmic scale. Both studies validated the hypothesis that chase and pursue describe faster motion, i.e., participants reliably estimated longer distances for descriptions that included those verbs. We place the results in the context of broader theories of pursuit perception and verb comprehension.

A number of studies have investigated whether cross-modal correspondence effect occurs in purely automatic manner or whether top-down processes can be involved in the processing. The current study addresses the disparity in the research conducting two experiments, using a classical audiovisual cross-modal correspondence paradigm and testing possible involvement of the endogenous component in the effect. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings and showed presence of cross-modal correspondence between pitch and spatial position. However, the effect was significant only in upper spatial position. Experiment 2 showed that task-related pitch probability manipulation made the cross-modal correspondence effect to disappear, however revealing an asymmetrical pattern that was highly dependent on pitch probability and spatial position. Overall, the results suggested a non-automaticity of the cross-modal correspondence effect and a possible involvement of endogenous component in the effect.

Spatial orientation and spatial navigation are important abilities. However, large individual differences are common in these spatial abilities, yet satisfying explanations about the origin of such differences are lacking. In this work, we measured the eye-tracking data of 26 participants who freely explored a large city (244 buildings) in an immersive virtual reality for 150 min. After the exploration, participants performed a pointing-to-building task in the same city. For the analysis, we transform the eye-tracking data into gaze-graphs and calculate graph-theoretical measures. We then model participants' mean task performance with a linear model using global gaze-graph measures (R²=0.41). Moreover, a linear model with graph diameter only results in an R² of 0.4; thus, graph diameter can explain 40% of the variance in the mean task performance of participants. Overall, our results show visual behavior, specifically gaze-graph diameter, to be a strong predictor of individual differences in spatial navigation performance.

Children's spatial and numerical skills are highly related, and predictive of concurrent and future mathematical ability (Lourenco et al., 2018). The number line estimation (NLE) task, in which children indicate the spatial positions of numbers on a line, is a commonly used index of spatial-numerical ability. Critically, training studies have demonstrated a causal link between NLE and math ability (Ramani & Siegler, 2008). Nonetheless, there is extensive debate about the role of numerical and domain-general abilities in the NLE task. Here, we used fMRI with young children to assess the neural mechanisms supporting NLE performance. Whole-brain and ROI analyses yielded significant activation in bilateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS) during the NLE task, relative to matched control conditions. Moreover, we found a positive association between neural maturity in bilateral IPS during the NLE task and behavioral measures of math ability (Cantlon & Li, 2013), controlling for analogical reasoning and spatial working memory.

Recent work using neural networks and crowd-sourced perceptual judgements has shown that human figure drawings contain latent structure that can predict many characteristics of the artist including parent-reported motor function and perceived gender. We extend these approaches to two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional cubes, assessing whether latent structure in these cube drawings likewise predicts demographic characteristics and motor function measured via a paper-folding task. Drawings produced with marker and paper showed a large predictive relationship with paper-folding (accounting for 59% of the offset variance, 62% of the angle variance, ps < .01). We also observed a complex interaction with gender: better cube-drawings predicted better paper-folding for male-identifying participants, but this relationship was reversed for female-identifying participants, who demonstrated better paper folding abilities overall. The results suggest that cube drawings contain richer structure than previously recognized and can provide a useful nonverbal metric for characterizing aspects of cognitive and motor abilities.

Numerical and spatial skills are highly interrelated, and both contribute to mathematical cognition. Spatial-numerical associations are frequently examined using number line estimation (NLE); however, there is considerable debate about the relative contributions of number-specific and domain-general (i.e., working memory) processing involved in this task. Here, we used functional neuroimaging to examine the processes supporting NLE in adults (n = 47). Participants completed an in-scanner NLE task and number localizer. We found that within left and right parietal number regions, neural activity during the in-scanner NLE task differentially predicted out-of-scanner behavioral measures. Specifically, activity in the left (but not right) posterior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) predicted visuo-spatial working memory, and activity in the left (but not right) anterior IPS predicted performance on an out-of-scanner NLE task. These findings suggest that NLE relies on both spatial-numerical and domain-general capacities supported by left-hemisphere parietal regions, challenging hypotheses about right-lateralized visuo-spatial contributions to number processing.

Cognitive scientists continue to debate gender/sex differences and similarities in basic problem-solving, including numerical and spatial cognition. While gender group differences may exist in these cognitive skills adulthood, it is unclear whether differences are fixed (early-developing, permanent) or plastic (late-developing, malleable). If fixed, they would relate more to gender categories; if plastic, they would relate more to gender socialization and spatial learning environment. To disentangle these hypotheses, we measured brain activity with fMRI in 51 children (4-8y; 20 boys / 31 girls) during numerical (vs. face) and geometric (vs. word) processing tasks. Activity occurred in bilateral superior and inferior parietal cortex during numerical and geometric processing, but activity within these regions was unrelated to gender category, gender socialization, or spatial learning environment. Bayesian analyses also revealed widespread gender similarities in numerical and geometric processing. These findings challenge the hypothesis of early, fixed gender differences in numerical and spatial development.

There is a long line of research that has investigated how different kinds of visual information (e.g. optic flow) guide high-speed steering. Additionally, researchers have developed visual control models that capture the relationship between information and steering. Although models have been designed for a variety of steering maneuvers, they all assume that steering behavior remains consistent whether a driver has driven down a road once or numerous times. Thus, models do not address how behavior changes as drivers become familiar with the layout of the road. Our work investigates how drivers incorporate visual information and spatial knowledge to guide steering . We present a virtual driving experiment that examines how steering changes as humans become more familiar with a track, measuring metrics including speed, steering angle, and lane deviation. Results inform the development of a cognitive model that captures the relationship between visual information and spatial knowledge to guide steering behavior.

Gonering & Corina (2023) argued that abstractions over visual scenes (i.e. schemas or situation models) provide a semantic scaffold for acquiring verb argument structures. We provide a systematic meta-analysis of 158 fMRI studies of verb processing (from NeuroSynth) and 208 fMRI studies of visual event processing (from NeuroQuery) suggestive of their hypothesis. Functional maps produced using Activation Likelihood Estimation via the Neuroimaging Meta-Analysis Research Environment package (Salo et al., 2022) (cluster-level family-wise error corrected using Monte Carlo method) showed overlapping regions of activation in the left inferior parietal lobule and Brodmann's area 47 bilaterally, suggesting shared neural resources for processing verbs and visual scenes. Meta-analyses on additional visual scene and verb processing studies from NeuroSynth and NeuroQuery, respectively, are also underway. We further intend to show that a hierarchical Bayesian model can learn verb argument structures from input statistics, even when they deviate from strong prior event semantic knowledge.

The spatial context of everyday speech to children is remarkably consistent. Words repeatedly occur in the same locations, and these words are learned earlier than those which are more scattered in use. Yet little is known about how spatial contextualization mediates this relationship. Does more constrained spatial context itself lead to better word learning? Or does it simply correlate with other informative cues in the input? Here, we assess how word learning is influenced by different levels of spatial contextualization in naturalistic scenes. We use different teaching methods (other-directed versus self-guided) as a proxy for distinguishing how the need for inductive inference mediates reliance on spatial context. We found that greater spatial contextualization led to better word learning, but only when inductive inference was needed. These findings suggest that learners can leverage spatial context to support word learning in the absence of rich linguistic input.

Orientation competence, the ability to determine one's location and heading direction, stands as one of the most fundamental skills. Maps are important for navigators providing spatial orientation. Researchers have investigated navigational map reading competence, wayfinding strategies, and performance in many experiments facing similar challenges to assess navigation behaviour in real and virtual environments.GeoGami is a free and open-source research software tailored for training and evaluating map-reading competence in navigational studies. Our software supports the assessment and training of sub-competencies of navigational map-reading through tasks tailored towards a specific sub-competency. We explain the unique design of the GeoGami, supporting diverse setups of navigational experiments while systematically assessing the performance. Our key contribution lies in demonstrating how theoretically defined navigational map-reading competencies can be implemented in GPS-enabled software and how systematically designed research software can effectively harness the diverse capabilities of digital maps and location-based systems for research and training purposes.

Sketch mapping is a method used to investigate an individual's cognitive map of the surrounding environment. Sketch maps provide qualitative insights into individuals' mental representations of space. Thus, sketch mapping is a powerful approach to study how people perceive and organize spatial information in their minds, Although the method of sketch mapping is used in numerous experiments to investigate people's spatial knowledge, there is no comprehensive method to analyze sketch maps. Most methods are quantitative and limited to counting features or determining the (metric) spatial distortion in sketch maps. Human spatial knowledge is incomplete, generalized and schematic. So are sketch maps. Our sketch map analysis method SketchMapia evaluates the completeness, level of generalization, and qualitative spatial accuracy of a sketch map. Our approach can assist researchers in psychology, cognitive science, geography, and education in systematically evaluating people's spatial knowledge via sketch maps, independent of specific research questions and experimental scenarios.

The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem originally of interest to mathematicians, but more recently used also in the context of cognitive and comparative psychology. Humans perform extremely well on spatial versions of this task, despite its mathematical complexity, making it an appealing tool for the study of spatial and mathematical cognition. We presented participants with three versions of a TSP in navigational space; one that could be solved visually, one with visual distractors, and one that also required the use of memory. The task was preceded by instructions that promoted either a ‘growth mindset' or ‘fixed mindset' approach. Results indicated that performance on this navigational version of the TSP is generally good, though not quite as efficient as solutions reported in the traditional pencil-and-paper version of the task. The effects of visual distractors and of memory requirements were greater in problems with a larger number of targets. Instructions had no significant effect on performance.

Human perceivers are very sensitive to which way others are facing, with head and eye gaze cues capturing attention (when directed at us), orienting attention (when directed elsewhere), and even influencing downstream judgments about others' social traits. But what causes us to see a shape as directed in the first place? Does the perception of a shape's facing direction depend mainly on its internal structure — or might it also be influenced by spatial context? In Experiment 1, observers briefly viewed a randomly oriented oval, and afterward used a circular slider to report which way they saw it as facing. A dot was always drawn near the oval — aligned with either its long or short symmetry axis. Observers were biased to see the oval as facing toward the dot, but this effect was much stronger when the dot was aligned with the oval's long (vs. short) symmetry axis, indicating that external elements interact with a shape's internal structure to determine its perceived facing direction. How automatic is this association between long-axis alignment and ‘towardness'? In Experiment 2, participants saw the same displays, and now made speeded keypresses to indicate whether the oval's long or short axis was aligned with the dot. In one block of trials, they pressed an anterior (further forward) key to report long-axis alignment, and a posterior (further back) key to report short-axis alignment. In another block, they responded with opposite key-mappings. Participants responded faster in the block where an anterior key was paired with long-axis alignment and a posterior key with short-axis alignment, suggesting an automatic bias to see long-axis alignment as facing towards. We conclude that the perception of facing direction is driven by the interaction of internal structure and external context, in a way which indicates the particular salience of long symmetry axes.

It takes children considerable learning and development to accurately predict whether an object is safely balanced or will fall -- something that happens if its center of mass is not supported from below. In the meantime, children go through a characteristic set of mistaken beliefs. Here we use an adapted version of the classical balance task to evaluate whether different models go through the same stages. Preliminary results show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) do learn the task but do not necessarily go through the same stages. We are also testing several simulation-based accounts. We anticipate completing this work in time for the conference. The findings will help clarify the space of possible accounts of children's acquisition of intuitions about gravity and balance.

Studying physical rotation (i.e., rotation tasks during which figures can be physically rotated, such as through gestures) can offer insights also into problem solving processes at work during mental rotation. We present a novel method for behavioral pattern analysis which we applied to data from 2,999 physical rotation tasks gathered in-class from 50 secondary school students. The method uses normalized, resampled, time-dependent data on angular offsets between figures over time and agglomerative, correlation-based clustering. Each cluster represents a distinct behavioral pattern and its respective prototype a problem solving strategy. Results indicate that multiple strategies were employed: The dominant strategy matches the classical model of mental rotation, in which angular offsets between figures are decreased over time. For the secondary strategy, angular offsets were actually increased. A subsequent analysis shows that the secondary strategy was more frequently used for symmetric figures, possibly indicating problems with correctly matching segments across figures.

Peripersonal space (PPS) is the multisensory representation of the near-body space. Several factors modulate PPS size and the sharpness of the boundary separating PPS and the far extrapersonal space, suggesting that PPS may be involved in the subjective experience and in the self-other representation. Such representations seem to be shaped by mindfulness meditation (MM); however, evidence on the effects of MM on PPS is limited. To test the hypothesis that MM modulates both PPS size and the sharpness of PPS boundary, we enrolled 26 non-meditators, who performed an audio-tactile task before and after a 15-minute guided focused attention meditation (FAM). Despite no changes of PPS size, after FAM we found a significantly reduced sharpness of PPS boundary, as if it dissolved. We suggest that the reduced separation between the self and the environment, reported by meditators in some phenomenological studies, may relate to the altered PPS sharpness.

We investigated the impact of nameability, presentation configuration, and placement structure on object location memory. In Experiment 1, participants memorized photos of nameable and unnameable objects presented at one of four screen locations, either one or four objects at a time. After a filled retention interval, they were presented again centrally, and participants indicated the position where they were previously located. Results revealed a substantial memory advantage for nameable objects. Presentation configuration had no effect. In Experiment 2, we replicated these findings and additionally investigated the role of placement structure by presenting objects either in the corners or on the left/right/top/bottom position of the screen. Memory was better for horizontal/vertical placement, but only for nameable objects. Thus, nameable objects profit from semantic encoding, which can be further improved by simple orientation cues. Notably, with an average accuracy of 50%, location memory was not as "massive" as suggested in previous studies.

In the context of online education, the impact of a speaker's gestures on children's spatial performance during learning still needs more exploration. Previous work found that spatial directions presented with gestures enhance children's performance on physical visuospatial arrays (Austin & Sweller, 2014). Here, we investigate whether spatial directions with or without gestures relate differently to 5-year-old monolingual Turkish children's spatial performance on a computerized map task. Children engaged in a task on a tablet that required them to recall the route directions presented in the videos either multimodally (speech-gestures combined) or in speech alone. Responses were coded for the target information in the route descriptions for actions (running), locations (school), and spatial directions (behind). Results only revealed better performance for encoding spatial directions presented multimodally (p=.013). Summarizing, the results emphasize the importance of multimodal input in enhancing children's spatial performance and highlight gestures' role in virtual visual-spatial learning environments.

Metaphor comprehension studies have investigated how we process metaphors by pitting conventional metaphors against novel ones. Although these studies have yielded much data on how we comprehend metaphors, no research has examined how we process novel spatial metaphors of time.We constructed a stimuli pool of 80 spatial metaphors of time, 40 were conventional time metaphors, whereas the other 40 were novel spatial metaphors of time evenly distributed among Moving-Ego or Moving-Time perspectives and Path or Manner metaphorical motion in the main verb. Ratings by 40 participants showed that the novel metaphors had more possible interpretations, were more ambiguous, difficult to interpret, less apt, and less conventional. A pilot study with 10 participants showed that these properties of metaphors were linked to metaphor interpretation and temporal gesture production in various ways. This study will continue to investigate how we process and represent novel spatial metaphors of time with more participants.

Humans are born with an intuitive representation of the physics world. How accurate is intuitive physics? Researchers from education focus on the failures, students' errors and misconceptions while cognitive psychologists argue humans anticipate and manipulate physical environments in ways betraying veridical knowledge of classical mechanics. One solution is to hypothesize there are distinct systems of “cognitive physics” with different limitations and deployment in the tasks favored by the two literatures. The goal of current study is to gather evidence from psychometric studies by estimating how many distinct factors explain performance on intuitive physics assessments. We build an augmented concept inventory including several previously-validated concept inventories, around 120 items. The pilot study indicated that participants recruited online from Prolific displayed expected accuracy on the tasks. We are now collecting around 1,000 participants and applying multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) analyzes to identify the latent structure.

Children frequently use under-informative expressions (e.g., Side) while describing Left-Right relations between objects but use gestures to disambiguate the relative locations of objects (Karadöller et al., 2022). Here we ask how children collect visual information about the spatial relations they express when planning such descriptions. Twenty Turkish-speaking 8-year-olds saw displays with four pictures of the same two objects in various spatial configurations. Target pictures described to a confederate depicted left-right relations (e.g., lemon left to box). Descriptions were coded whether they were informative in speech, informative with gesture, or under-informative. Children had more target fixations when planning (1) informative than under-informative descriptions (β=0.515, SE=0.131, p

Numbers and space are associated in the mind, and in language. We investigate 6,400 instances of verbs indicating vertical movement (e.g., rise, fall, decline) or size-based changes (e.g., contract, grow, extend) in four corpora, showing that 60% of all uses occur in quantitative contexts (e.g., ‘prices rose'). For concrete spatial language, it has been found that movement goals are more likely encoded than sources (e.g., Lakusta & Landau 2005, Stefanowitsch, 2018). We demonstrate that this asymmetry carries over to spatial-numerical language, which more often encodes goals (e.g., ‘revenue went up to 48 million') than sources (e.g., ‘share prices rose from $7.13'). In line with their path-related meaning, vertical verbs showed a much higher propensity to encode endpoints (20%) than size-based verbs (10%), a large effect (Cohen's d = 2.0). These results show that the goal bias attested for spatial language carries over to abstract conceptual domains.

Some have speculated that higher-order cognitive functions repurpose mechanisms that evolved for perception and action. Expanding on these ideas, we explored whether creativity builds on our ability to strategically navigate through space ('Creativity as Strategic Foraging'). We establish a connection between different types of creative thinking—divergent and convergent—and corresponding spatial search strategies. Participants completed tests of both divergent and convergent creativity. Before each creativity trial, they searched a city map for which we manipulated the search pattern: half the participants searched for multiple dispersed locations, the rest converged repeatedly on a single location. Participants who engaged in divergent spatial search exhibited superior divergent thinking but poorer convergent thinking, while the opposite held true for participants who repeatedly converged on a single location. These findings highlight a targeted association between spatial foraging and creativity, contributing to a deeper understanding of the underpinnings and mechanisms of high-level cognitive processes.

Space helps us understand abstract math concepts (Winter et al., 2015). Mental rotation is often studied for its predictive role in math development (Casey et al., 2015; Geer et al., 2019). The association between spatial location knowledge and math development remains overlooked despite the significance of left-right body space encoding in numbers (SNARC effect, Dehaene et al., 1993). This ongoing study investigates the link between preschoolers' mental rotation skills, spatial location knowledge, and various mathematical abilities (symbolic, non-symbolic, counting). Preliminary analyses (N= 20; Mage= 4;6) using R showed a significant relationship between spatial location knowledge and symbolic math (r= .43; p= .05) and counting skills (r= .51; p= .02), while no such association is found between mental rotation skills and mathematical abilities (all ps> .05). These findings demonstrate a strong link between spatial location knowledge, but not mental rotation, and development of preschoolers' mathematical skills.Keywords: space; number; preschoolers

Spatial demonstratives exist in all languages, but currently there is much debate regarding the parameters that affect their use both between and within languages. In this work, we explore ‘perspective taking' as a means of accounting for variation in demonstrative use both between and within languages. Analysing primary and secondary data, we test the effects of egocentric distance and addressee position on demonstrative production in speakers of two languages with two purportedly different demonstrative systems: English and Japanese. Based on individual differences between speakers, we propose a framework unifying different theoretical accounts of demonstrative systems in which demonstratives require a spatial reference frame to be chosen prior to the application of a range of routines to select the appropriate term in a given context.

Alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs) offer a unique window into how sexual selection can shape cognition and nonreproductive behaviour. Sexual selection more broadly has been shown to shape cognitive traits but has rarely been investigated in the context of ARTs. Furthermore, the divergent morphology and sexual behaviour associated with ARTs may lead to different socioecological challenges (e.g. predation, space use) that further shape nonreproductive behaviours. We take advantage of the behavioural diversity in alternative reproductive tactics among male El Abra swordtails, Xiphophorus nigrensis , to ask how cognition and behaviour diverge between male tactics. We tested courting (large), coercive (small) and mixed-strategy (intermediate-sized) male phenotypes in four assays to evaluate boldness, aggression, exploration, spatial learning and spatiotemporal learning. We found that the courting-only large male phenotype had faster latencies to the reward in the spatial learning assay than the other two male phenotypes and also had greater accuracy than chance. Furthermore, we found that courting phenotypes (large and intermediate-sized males) had greater increases in accuracy over successive trials than the coercive-only small male phenotype. We also found that small, coercive male phenotypes were bolder than large and intermediate-sized males. We found no differences in aggressive behaviour (directed at a mirror) or spatiotemporal learning (shuttle box assay) across the three phenotypes. We suggest that courting males' superior spatial learning abilities may reflect their defence of females at ephemeral foraging patches as well as their need for reliable escape routes from predators. Coercive males' increased boldness may bolster their persistent behaviour and reflect reduced predation pressure. These results suggest that sexual selection for alternative reproductive strategies affects nonreproductive behaviour and cognition in directions that may align with divergent socioecological challenges associated with each mating type. • We examine how cognition and behaviour diverge in male swordtail mating tactics. • Courtship was associated with greater performance in a spatial learning task. • Coercive-only phenotypes were more bold. • Mating tactic did not explain differences in spatiotemporal learning or aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental representations of space can be generated and communicated with respect to different reference frames and perspectives. The present study investigated the effects of age and individual differences in domain-general executive functions on people's ability to process spatial relations as expressed in language within different spatial reference frames (SRFs). Healthy adults aged between 18 and 85 completed a novel task involving self-, third-person-, object-, and environment-centered judgements of spatial relations between two objects, as well as standard tests of working memory, inhibition, and mental flexibility. A psychometric evaluation confirmed the test-retest reliability and the convergent and divergent validity of the new task. Results showed that the lifespan trajectories varied depending on the SRF. Processing from a self-centered perspective or an object-centered frame remained intact throughout the adult-lifespan. By contrast, spatial processing from a third-person-centered perspective or within an environment-centered frame declined in late adulthood. Mediation regression models showed that mental flexibility accounted for a significant part of the age-related variance in spatial processing across all allocentric SRFs. The age effects on environment-centered processing were also partially mediated by age-related changes in visuospatial working memory capacity. These findings suggest that at least partially distinct systems are involved in mentally representing space under different SRFs, which are differentially affected by typical aging. Our results also highlight that people's ability to process spatial relations across different SRFs depends on their capacity to employ domain-general effortful cognitive resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]