Elementary teachers' attitudes and beliefs about spatial thinking and mathematics.

Considering how spatial thinking connects to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) outcomes, recent studies have evaluated how spatial interventions impact elementary students' math learning. While promising, these interventions tend to overlook other factors affecting math learning; perceptions of math abilities, beliefs about math, and math anxiety can also impact math performance. Additionally, perceptions of spatial skill and spatial anxiety impact spatial performance.

Self-reported navigation ability is associated with optic flow-sensitive regions' functional connectivity patterns during visual path integration.

Introduction: Spatial navigation is a complex cognitive skill that varies between individuals, and the mechanisms underlying this variability are not clear. Studying simpler components of spatial navigation may help illuminate factors that contribute to variation in this complex skill; path integration is one such component. Optic flow provides self-motion information while moving through an environment and is sufficient for path integration.

Make-A-Dice Test: Assessing the intersection of mathematical and spatial thinking.

Individuals with better spatial thinking have increased interest and greater achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow in Journal of Educational Psychology, 101, 817-835, 2009). This relationship means that STEM education may benefit from leveraging spatial thinking, but measures of spatial thinking as they relate to specific STEM disciplines are needed. The present work presents an assessment of spatial and mathematical reasoning, called Make-A-Dice.

The Neural Basis of Individual Differences in Directional Sense.

Individuals differ greatly in their ability to learn and navigate through environments. One potential source of this variation is "directional sense" or the ability to identify, maintain, and compare allocentric headings. Allocentric headings are facing directions that are fixed to the external environment, such as cardinal directions.

How sense-of-direction and learning intentionality relate to spatial knowledge acquisition in the environment.

People's impression of their own "sense-of-direction" (SOD) is related to their ability to effectively find their way through environments, such as neighborhoods and cities, but is also related to the speed and accuracy with which they learn new environments. In the current literature, it is unclear whether the cognitive skills underlying SOD require intentional cognitive effort to produce accurate knowledge of a new environment. The cognitive skills underlying SOD could exert their influence automatically-without conscious intention-or they might need to be intentionally and effortfully applied.

Think3d!: Improving mathematics learning through embodied spatial training.

Spatial thinking skills positively relate to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) outcomes, but spatial training is largely absent in elementary school. Elementary school is a time when children develop foundational cognitive skills that will support STEM learning throughout their education. Spatial thinking should be considered a foundational cognitive skill.

The Map in Our Head Is Not Oriented North: Evidence from a Real-World Environment.

Like most physical maps, recent research has suggested that cognitive maps of familiar environments may have a north-up orientation. We demonstrate that north orientation is not a necessary feature of cognitive maps and instead may arise due to coincidental alignment between cardinal directions and the built and natural environment. Experiment 1 demonstrated that pedestrians have difficulty pointing north while navigating a familiar real-world environment with roads, buildings, and green spaces oriented oblique to cardinal axes.

Location memory for dots in polygons versus cities in regions: evaluating the category adjustment model.

We conducted 3 experiments to examine the category adjustment model (Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan, 1991) in circumstances in which the category boundaries were irregular schematized polygons made from outlines of maps. For the first time, accuracy was tested when only perceptual and/or existing long-term memory information about identical locations was cued. Participants from Alberta, Canada and California received 1 of 3 conditions: dots-only, in which a dot appeared within the polygon, and after a 4-s dynamic mask the empty polygon appeared and the participant indicated where the dot had been; dots-and-names, in which participants were told that the first polygon represented Alberta/California and that each dot was in the correct location for the city whose name appeared outside the polygon; and names-only, in which there was no first polygon, and participants clicked on the city locations from extant memory alone.