Auditory spatial concepts in blind football experts

ObjectivesWe compared the spatial concepts given to sounds' directions by blind football players with both blind non-athletes and sighted individuals.MethodParticipants verbally described the directions of sounds around them by using predefined spatial concept labels, under two blocked conditions: 1) facing front, 2) pointing with the hand towards the stimulus.ResultsBlind football players categorized the directions more precisely (i.e., they used simple labels for describing the cardinal directions and combined labels for the intermediate ones) than the other groups, and their categorization was less sensitive to the response conditions than blind non-athletes. Sighted participants' categorization was similar to previous studies, in which the front and back regions were generally more precisely described than the sides, where simple labels were often used for describing directions around the absolute left and right.ConclusionsThe differences in conceptual categorization of sound directions are a) in sighted individuals, influenced by the representation of the visual space b) in blind individuals, influenced by the level of expertise in action and locomotion based on non-visual information, which can be increased by auditive stimulation provided by blind football training.     

How do biases in spatial memory change as children and adults are learning locations?

This investigation tracked changes in categorical bias (i.e., placing objects belonging to the same spatial group closer together than they really are) while 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and adults were learning a set of locations. Participants learned the locations of 20 objects marked by dots on the floor of an open square box divided into quadrants. At test, participants attempted to place the objects in the correct locations without the dots and boundaries. In Experiment 1, we probed categorical bias during learning by alternating learning and test trials. Categorical bias was high during the first test trial and decreased over the second and third test trials. In Experiment 2, we manipulated opportunities for learning by providing participants with either one, two, three, or four learning trials prior to test. Participants who experienced one or two learning trials exhibited more bias at test than did those who experienced four learning trials. The discussion focuses on how categorical bias emerges through interactions between the cognitive system and task structure.     

Great apes’ capacities to recognize relational similarity

Recognizing relational similarity relies on the ability to understand that defining object properties might not lie in the objects individually, but in the relations of the properties of various object to each other. This aptitude is highly relevant for many important human skills such as language, reasoning, categorization and understanding analogy and metaphor. In the current study, we investigated the ability to recognize relational similarities by testing five species of great apes, including human children in a spatial task. We found that all species performed better if related elements are connected by logico-causal as opposed to non-causal relations. Further, we find that only children above 4 years of age, bonobos and chimpanzees, unlike younger children, gorillas and orangutans display some mastery of reasoning by non-causal relational similarity. We conclude that recognizing relational similarity is not in its entirety unique to the human species. The lack of a capability for language does not prohibit recognition of simple relational similarities. The data are discussed in the light of the phylogenetic tree of relatedness of the great apes.     

Cognitive representation of auditory space in blind football experts

ObjectivesWe compared the mental representation of sound directions in blind football players, blind non-athletes and sighted individuals.DesignStanding blindfolded in the middle of a circle with 16 loudspeakers, participants judged whether the directions of two subsequently presented sounds were similar or not.MethodStructure dimensional analysis (SDA) was applied to reveal mean cluster solutions for the groups.ResultsHierarchical cluster analysis via SDA resulted in distinct representation structures of sound directions. The blind football players' mean cluster solution consisted of pairs of neighboring directions. The blind non-athletes also clustered the directions in pairs, but included non-adjacent directions. In the sighted participants' structure, frontal directions were clustered pairwise, the absolute back was singled out, and the side regions accounted for more directions.ConclusionsOur results suggest that the mental representation of egocentric auditory space is influenced by sight and by the level of expertise in auditory-based orientation and navigation.     

Frames of reference in spatial language acquisition

Languages differ in how they encode spatial frames of reference. It is unknown how children acquire the particular frame-of-reference terms in their language (e.g., left/right, north/south). The present paper uses a word-learning paradigm to investigate 4-year-old English-speaking children’s acquisition of such terms. In Part I, with five experiments, we contrasted children’s acquisition of novel word pairs meaning left-right and north-south to examine their initial hypotheses and the relative ease of learning the meanings of these terms. Children interpreted ambiguous spatial terms as having environment-based meanings akin to north and south, and they readily learned and generalized north-south meanings. These studies provide the first direct evidence that children invoke geocentric representations in spatial language acquisition. However, the studies leave unanswered how children ultimately acquire “left” and “right.” In Part II, with three more experiments, we investigated why children struggle to master body-based frame-of-reference words. Children successfully learned “left” and “right” when the novel words were systematically introduced on their own bodies and extended these words to novel (intrinsic and relative) uses; however, they had difficulty learning to talk about the left and right sides of a doll. This difficulty was paralleled in identifying the left and right sides of the doll in a non-linguistic memory task. In contrast, children had no difficulties learning to label the front and back sides of a doll. These studies begin to paint a detailed account of the acquisition of spatial terms in English, and provide insights into the origins of diverse spatial reference frames in the world’s languages.     

Facing the sunrise: cultural worldview underlying intrinsic-based encoding of absolute frames of reference in aymara

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: nayra (“front”) and qhipa (“back”), denoting east and west, respectively. Why? We use different but complementary ethnographic methods to investigate the nature of this encoding: (a) linguistic expressions and speech–gesture co‐production, (b) linguistic patterns in the distinct regional Spanish‐based variety Castellano Andino (CA), (c) metaphorical extensions of CA’s spatial patterns to temporal ones, and (d) layouts of traditional houses. Findings indicate that, following fundamental principles of Aymara cosmology, people, objects, and land—as a whole—are conceived as having an implicit canonical orientation facing east, a primary landmark determined by the sunrise. The above bodily based lexicalizations are thus linguistic manifestations of a broader macro‐cultural worldview and its psycho‐cognitive reality.     

Relative contribution of perception/cognition and language on spatial categorization

This study investigated the relative contribution of perception/cognition and language-specific semantics in nonverbal categorization of spatial relations. English and Korean speakers completed a video-based similarity judgment task involving containment, support, tight fit, and loose fit. Both perception/cognition and language served as resources for categorization, and allocation between the two depended on the target relation and the features contrasted in the choices. Whereas perceptual/cognitive salience for containment and tight-fit features guided categorization in many contexts, language-specific semantics influenced categorization where the two features competed for similarity judgment and when the target relation was tight support, a domain where spatial relations are perceptually diverse. In the latter contexts, each group categorized more in line with semantics of their language, that is, containment/support for English and tight/loose fit for Korean. We conclude that language guides spatial categorization when perception/cognition alone is not sufficient. In this way, language is an integral part of our cognitive domain of space.     

Representing Spatial Structure Through Maps and Language: Lord of the Rings Encodes the Spatial Structure of Middle Earth

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non‐linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In a computational linguistic study, we demonstrated that co‐occurrences of cities in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit predicted the authentic longitude and latitude of those cities in Middle Earth. In a human study, we showed that human spatial estimates of the location of cities were very similar regardless of whether participants read Tolkien’s texts or memorized a map of Middle Earth. However, text‐based location estimates obtained from statistical linguistic frequencies better predicted the human text‐based estimates than the human map‐based estimates. These findings suggest that language encodes spatial structure of cities, and that human cognitive map representations can come from implicit statistical linguistic patterns, from explicit non‐linguistic perceptual information, or from both.     

Cognitive effects of language on human navigation

Language has been linked to spatial representation and behavior in humans, but the nature of this effect is debated. Here, we test whether simple verbal expressions improve 4-year-old children’s performance in a disoriented search task in a small rectangular room with a single red landmark wall. Disoriented children’s landmark-guided search for a hidden object was dramatically enhanced when the experimenter used certain verbal expressions to designate the landmark during the hiding event. Both a spatial expression (“I’m hiding the sticker at the red/white wall”) and a non-spatial but task-relevant expression (“The red/white wall can help you get the sticker”) enhanced children’s search, relative to uncued controls. By contrast, a verbal expression that drew attention to the landmark in a task-irrelevant manner (“Look at this pretty red/white wall”) produced no such enhancement. These findings provide further evidence that language changes spatial behavior in children and illuminate one mechanism through which language exerts its effect: by helping children understand the relevance of landmarks for encoding locations.     

Modularity and spatial reorientation in a simple mind: encoding of geometric and nongeometric properties of a spatial environment by fish

When disoriented in environments with distinctive geometry, such as a closed rectangular arena, human infants and adult rats reorient in accord with the large-scale shape of the environment, but not in accord with nongeometric properties such as the colour of a wall. Human adults, however, conjoined geometric and nongeometric information to reorient themselves, which has led to the suggestion that spatial processing tends to become more flexible over development and evolution. We here show that fish tested in the same tasks perform like human adults and surpass rats and human infants. These findings suggest that the ability to make use of geometry for spatial reorientation is an ancient evolutionary tract and that flexibility and accessibility to multiple sources of information to reorient in space is more a matter of ecological adaptations than phylogenetic distance from humans.     

A comparison of metacognitions in patients with hallucinations,delusions, panic disorder,and non-patient controls

This study tested the hypothesis that metacognitions are a general vulnerability factor for psychological disorder. It was predicted that patients with psychosis (hallucinations or delusions), and patients with panic disorder would score higher than non-patients on measures of metacognition. Moreover, it was hypothesised that patients showing most dysregulation of thinking (voice-hearers) would endorse significantly higher metacognition scores than individuals in the other groups. The Meta-Cognitions Questionnaire (MCQ: ) was administered to patients who met DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia spectrum disorders with auditory hallucinations, patients who met DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia spectrum disorders with persecutory delusions, patients who met DSM-IV criteria for panic disorder and non-patients. The results showed that psychotic patients who experience auditory hallucinations tended to exhibit higher levels of dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs than other patient groups, scoring significantly higher than at least two of the three control groups on positive beliefs about worry, negative beliefs about uncontrollability and danger, cognitive confidence and negative beliefs including superstition, punishment and responsibility. It was also found that the metacognitive beliefs of patients with persecutory delusions and panic patients were often similar to each other, and elevated in comparison to non-patients, suggesting that such beliefs are generic vulnerability factors. The theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Getting the big picture: Development of spatial scaling abilities

Spatial scaling is an integral aspect of many spatial tasks that involve symbol-to-referent correspondences (e.g., map reading, drawing). In this study, we asked 3–6-year-olds and adults to locate objects in a two-dimensional spatial layout using information from a second spatial representation (map). We examined how scaling factor and reference features, such as the shape of the layout or the presence of landmarks, affect performance. Results showed that spatial scaling on this simple task undergoes considerable development, especially between 3 and 5 years of age. Furthermore, the youngest children showed large individual variability and profited from landmark information. Accuracy differed between scaled and un-scaled items, but not between items using different scaling factors (1:2 vs. 1:4), suggesting that participants encoded relative rather than absolute distances.     

Empirical evaluation of virtual environment technology as an experimental tool in developmental spatial cognition research

The study compared developmental aspects of spatial knowledge acquisition in a real and a virtual large-scale environment according to the classical study of Cohen and Schuepfer (1980 Cohen, R. and Schuepfer, T. 1980. The representation of landmarks and routes. Child Development, 51: 1065–1071. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) with 40 younger children (7–8 years old), 40 older children (11–12 years old), and 40 adults. All participants learned the correct route through a maze, recalled the inherent landmarks, and drew a map of the maze. The results revealed equivalent age effects for these tasks in the real and the virtual world. In both conditions younger children needed more trials to learn the route and showed less configurational knowledge than older children and adults. Age group performance on landmark recollection did not differ in either the virtual or the real world maze. Except for the map drawing task performance was always worse in the virtual world condition. Because the developmental process was comparable in real and virtual environments, the results support the use of virtual environments for the research on developmental aspects of spatial knowledge.     

Is running a state of mind? Sports training as a potential method for developing cognitive flexibility

The study aimed to test the significance of sports participation as a potential means of improving cognitive function, particularly cognitive flexibility. Based on the characteristics of orienteering, such as frequent changes of behavioural strategies in response to changes in the situation or the simultaneous performance of several mental activities, we assumed that practising this sport could foster the development of cognitive flexibility. Two groups of volunteers were compared: 50 middle and long-distance runners and 50 orienteering runners in terms of their performance on the following measures of cognitive flexibility: a divergent thinking task, a computer flexibility task, Cognitive Flexibility Scale, and Verbal Fluency Test as a measure of executive function. Orienteering runners outperformed others on all measures except the Cognitive Flexibility Scale. Furthermore, we found that training characteristics (regularity, frequency, participation in competitions) were associated with levels of cognitive flexibility, particularly among orienteering runners, where they explained between 38% and 39% of the overall flexibility variance. Our results suggest that cognitive flexibility can be developed through sports training requiring effective dealing in a changing, complex environment. We also discuss the implications of our results for cognitive training research.     

Plasticity of human spatial cognition: spatial language and cognition covary across cultures

The present paper explores cross-cultural variation in spatial cognition by comparing spatial reconstruction tasks by Dutch and Namibian elementary school children. These two communities differ in the way they predominantly express spatial relations in language. Four experiments investigate cognitive strategy preferences across different levels of task-complexity and instruction. Data show a correlation between dominant linguistic spatial frames of reference and performance patterns in non-linguistic spatial memory tasks. This correlation is shown to be stable across an increase of complexity in the spatial array. When instructed to use their respective non-habitual cognitive strategy, participants were not easily able to switch between strategies and their attempts to do so impaired their performance. These results indicate a difference not only in preference but also in competence and suggest that spatial language and non-linguistic preferences and competences in spatial cognition are systematically aligned across human populations.