Origins of spatial, temporal and numerical cognition: Insights from comparative psychology

Contemporary comparative cognition has a large repertoire of animal models and methods, with concurrent theoretical advances that are providing initial answers to crucial questions about human cognition. What cognitive traits are uniquely human? What are the species-typical inherited predispositions of the human mind? What is the human mind capable of without certain types of specific experiences with the surrounding environment? Here, we review recent findings from the domains of space, time and number cognition. These findings are produced using different comparative methodologies relying on different animal species, namely birds and non-human great apes. The study of these species not only reveals the range of cognitive abilities across vertebrates, but also increases our understanding of human cognition in crucial ways.     

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.     

Embodied inference and spatial cognition

How much about our interactions with--and experience of--our world can be deduced from basic principles? This paper reviews recent attempts to understand the self-organised behaviour of embodied agents, like ourselves, as satisfying basic imperatives for sustained exchanges with the environment. In brief, one simple driving force appears to explain many aspects of perception, action and the perception of action. This driving force is the minimisation of surprise or prediction error, which--in the context of perception--corresponds to Bayes-optimal predictive coding (that suppresses exteroceptive prediction errors) and--in the context of action--reduces to classical motor reflexes (that suppress proprioceptive prediction errors). In what follows, we look at some of the phenomena that emerge from this single principle, such as the perceptual encoding of spatial trajectories that can both generate movement (of self) and recognise the movements (of others). These emergent behaviours rest upon prior beliefs about itinerant (wandering) states of the world--but where do these beliefs come from? In this paper, we focus on the nature of prior beliefs and how they underwrite the active sampling of a spatially extended sensorium. Put simply, to avoid surprising states of the world, it is necessary to minimise uncertainty about those states. When this minimisation is implemented via prior beliefs--about how we sample the world--the resulting behaviour is remarkably reminiscent of searches seen in foraging or visual searches with saccadic eye movements.     

Chronometric studies of numerical cognition in five-month-old infants

Developmental research suggests that some of the mechanisms that underlie numerical cognition are present and functional in human infancy. To investigate these mechanisms and their developmental course, psychologists have turned to behavioral and electrophysiological methods using briefly presented displays. These methods, however, depend on the assumption that young infants can extract numerical information rapidly. Here we test this assumption and begin to investigate the speed of numerical processing in five-month-old infants. Infants successfully discriminated between arrays of 4 vs. 8 dots on the basis of number when a new array appeared every 2 s, but not when a new array appeared every 1.0 or 1.5 s. These results suggest alternative interpretations of past findings, provide constraints on the design of future experiments, and introduce a new method for probing infants' enumeration process. Further experiments using this method provide initial evidence that infants' enumeration mechanism operates in parallel and yields increasingly accurate numerical representations over time, as does the enumeration mechanism used by adults in symbolic and non-symbolic tasks.     

Dimensional transformation in tests of spatial and environmental cognition

In previous research, it has been argued that spatial performance on psychometric tests might be accounted for, in part, by the need for test-takers to transform mentally two-dimensional (2-D) test items into a three-dimensional (3-D) representation. With this in mind, the Landscape Perception Test (LPT) was designed to isolate the 2-D to 3-D (and vice versa) transformational aspect of spatial cognition. Gender differences were used as an indirect means to examine the contribution of the 2-D to 3-D transformation to spatial performance. Since the LPT was designed by means of an image relevant to geospatial cognition, measures of environmental cognition, as well as experience in various activities, were also examined. One hundred thirty undergraduate students (66 females and 64 males) completed the Childhood Activities Questionnaire, the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Test, the Visualization of Views (VV) Test, the Perspective Taking/Spatial Orientation Test, and the LPT. Results showed higher scores for men than for women on LPT items requiring 2-D to 3-D conversion (LPT23), but not on those requiring the reverse operation. In addition, only the LPT23 produced significant indirect effects of gender on VV Test performance. Performance on the tests was also correlated with environmental cognition and previous experience with spatial activities. The results suggest that dimensional transformation might be a factor significantly contributing to spatial performance. Psychometric aspects of the LPT are also discussed.     

An encoding-complex approach to numerical cognition in Chinese-English bilinguals.

We present a model of the cognitive architecture of basic numerical skills in adult Chinese-English bilinguals. The model is based on data reported by Campbell, Kanz, and Xue (1999) and combines Dehaene and Cohen's triple-code theory with Campbell and Clark's encoding-complex approach to modeling number processing. Participants were required to name, add or multiply Arabic or Mandarin numerals and to respond in English or Chinese. They also performed magnitude comparisons on pairs of Arabic or Mandarin numerals. The proposed model of their performance on this set of tasks assumes 1) that number processing is modular with respect to representational code (e.g., visual, visuo-spatial, verbal) rather than with respect to numerical function, 2) task-specific communication between representational codes is interactive rather than additive, and 3) memory for arithmetic facts is at least partially language-based and our Chinese-English bilinguals possessed both Chinese and English-language number-fact representations. We provide new analyses of the arithmetic data and a review of research on the role of language in simple arithmetic to substantiate our claims about linguistic codes for number-fact memory.     

Multiple views of spatial memory

Recent evidence indicates that mental representations of large (i.e., navigable) spaces are viewpoint dependent when observers are restricted to a single view. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether two views of a space would produce a single viewpoint-independent representation or two viewpoint-dependent representations. Participants learned the locations of objects in a room from two viewpoints and then made judgments of relative direction from imagined headings either aligned or misaligned with the studied views. The results indicated that mental representations of large spaces were viewpoint dependent, and that two views of a spatial layout appeared to produce two viewpoint-dependent representations in memory. Imagined headings aligned with the study views were more accessible than were novel headings in terms of both speed and accuracy of pointing judgments.     

Visual attention and its intimate links to spatial cognition

It is almost universal to regard attention as the facility that permits an agent, human or machine, to give priority processing resources to relevant stimuli while ignoring the irrelevant. The reality of how this might manifest itself throughout all the forms of perceptual and cognitive processes possessed by humans, however, is not as clear. Here, we examine this reality with a broad perspective in order to highlight the myriad ways that attentional processes impact both perception and cognition. The paper concludes by showing two real-world problems that exhibit sufficient complexity to illustrate the ways in which attention and cognition connect. These then point to new avenues of research that might illuminate the overall cognitive architecture of spatial cognition.     

Playing an action video game reduces gender differences in spatial cognition

We demonstrate a previously unknown gender difference in the distribution of spatial attention, a basic capacity that supports higher-level spatial cognition. More remarkably, we found that playing an action video game can virtually eliminate this gender difference in spatial attention and simultaneously decrease the gender disparity in mental rotation ability, a higher-level process in spatial cognition. After only 10 hr of training with an action video game, subjects realized substantial gains in both spatial attention and mental rotation, with women benefiting more than men. Control subjects who played a non-action game showed no improvement. Given that superior spatial skills are important in the mathematical and engineering sciences, these findings have practical implications for attracting men and women to these fields.     

Adult's failures on euclidean and projective spatial tasks: Implications for characterizing spatial cognition

In their initial study of the development of children's spatial concepts, Piaget and Inhelder (1956) designed the “water-level” and “plumb-line” tasks to assess children's Euclidean abilities to perceive and represent horizontals and verticals. Surprisingly, subsequent research has shown that many adults perform badly on these tasks designed for children. Here we studied whether adults (N=160) would also have difficulty on a shadow projection task developed to assess theoretically related projective spatial concepts. The data showed that some adults had difficulty on the shadow task, whether tested by a drawing or by a selection task, and whether scored with respect to qualitative shape or metric accuracy. Performance was significantly worse on complex than simple forms, and when sex differences emerged, they favored males. As hypothesized, the best predictor of shadow performance was performance on the Euclidean tasks. Scores on the Embedded Figures Test and participant sex accounted for small (but significant) additional variance on shadow performance. Implications for theories of spatial development and for modeling individual differences in spatial cognition are discussed.     

Influence of mapping complexity on negative priming for incompatible spatial mappings

For tasks with an incompatible stimulus-response mapping, whether the compatible response must be inhibited paradigm for four-choice tasks with three different incompatible spatial mappings. For a mapping that did not follow a simple rule, reaction time was lengthened when the corresponding response on the preceding trial became the required response on the current trial, as compared with when it did not, showing a negative priming effect. However, for mappings that followed a simple rule, negative priming was not evident. The present study extends this research to a more complex mapping. On the basis of a two-process model adopted from the negative priming literature, we hypothesized that high mapping complexity should also diminish the negative priming effect for incompatible mappings, because the balance of cognitive resources is allocated to identification of the correct response. Two experiments are reported in which mappings of different complexity were used in six-choice spatial tasks. Analyses of reaction times showed that negative priming diminished with increased mapping complexity, apparently due to increased dominance of response identification processes, rather than inhibition of the corresponding response.     

Sex differences in spatial cognition, computational fluency, and arithmetical reasoning

Alternative explanations for the male advantage in arithmetical reasoning, as measured by the ability to solve complex word problems, include a male advantage in spatial cognition and a male advantage in computational fluency. The current study was designed to test these competing hypotheses. To this end, 113 male and 123 female undergraduates were administered arithmetical computations and arithmetical reasoning tests, along with an IQ test and a test of spatial cognition. There was no sex difference on the IQ test, but males showed significantly higher mean scores on the arithmetical computations, arithmetical reasoning, and spatial cognition measures. A series of structural equation models indicated that individual differences in arithmetical reasoning were related to individual differences in IQ, spatial abilities, and computational fluency. Moreover, the results suggested that the male advantage in arithmetical reasoning is mediated by the male advantages in both computational fluency and spatial cognition.     

Speech and gesture in spatial language and cognition among the Yucatec Mayas

In previous analyses of the influence of language on cognition, speech has been the main channel examined. In studies conducted among Yucatec Mayas, efforts to determine the preferred frame of reference in use in this community have failed to reach an agreement (Bohnemeyer & Stolz, 2006; Levinson, 2003 vs. Le Guen, 2006, 2009). This paper argues for a multimodal analysis of language that encompasses gesture as well as speech, and shows that the preferred frame of reference in Yucatec Maya is only detectable through the analysis of co-speech gesture and not through speech alone. A series of experiments compares knowledge of the semantics of spatial terms, performance on nonlinguistic tasks and gestures produced by men and women. The results show a striking gender difference in the knowledge of the semantics of spatial terms, but an equal preference for a geocentric frame of reference in nonverbal tasks. In a localization task, participants used a variety of strategies in their speech, but they all exhibited a systematic preference for a geocentric frame of reference in their gestures.     

Aiming error under transformed spatial mappings suggests a structure for visual-motor maps

Transformed spatial mappings were used to perturb normal visual-motor processes and reveal the structure of internal spatial representations used by the motor control system. In a 2-D discrete aiming task performed under rotated visual-motor mappings, the pattern of spatial movement error was the same for all Ss: peak error between 90 degrees and 135 degrees of rotation and low error for 180 degrees rotation. A two-component spatial representation, based on oriented bidirectional movement axes plus direction of travel along such axes, is hypothesized. Observed reversals of movement direction under rotations greater than 90 degrees are consistent with the hypothesized structure. Aiming error under reflections, unlike rotations, depended on direction of movement relative to the axis of reflection (see Cunningham & Pavel, in press). Reaction time and movement time effects were observed, but a speed-accuracy tradeoff was found only for rotations for which the direction-reversal strategy could be used. Finally, adaptation to rotation operates at all target locations equally but does not alter the relative difficulty of different rotations. Structural properties of the representation are invariant under learning.     

Determinants of the benefit for consistent spatial mappings in dual-task performance of three-choice tasks

Performance of pairs of three-choice tasks shows a consistency benefit for which reaction times are shorter when the stimulus-response mappings for each task are consistent (both corresponding or both mirrored) than when they are inconsistent. In the present study, we examined whether this consistency benefit is reduced at long stimulus onset asynchronies, as it is for pairs of two-choice tasks, or is relatively unaffected, as it is for pairs of four-choice tasks. The consistency benefit was evident for both corresponding and mirrored mappings, at all intervals. For consistent mirrored mappings, the benefit was found for the side stimulus positions (for which responses are crossed) but not for the center position, whereas for consistent corresponding mappings, a benefit was evident for the center position as well. The results for both mappings are in agreement with an emergent mapping-choice account. The consistent corresponding mapping also benefits from subjects’ ability to apply a respond-corresponding rule across tasks. An emergent perceptual-feature process that contributes to the consistency benefit for two-choice tasks does not seem to play a role in tasks with three or more choices.     

Multiple systems of spatial memory and action

Recent findings from spatial cognition and cognitive neuroscience suggest that different types of mental representations could mediate the off-line retrieval of spatial relations from memory and the on-line guidance of motor actions in space. As a result, a number of models proposing multiple systems of spatial memory have been recently formulated. In the present article we review these models and we evaluate their postulates based on available experimental evidence. Furthermore, we discuss how a multiple-system model can apply to situations in which people reason about their immediate surroundings or non-immediate environments by incorporating a model of sensorimotor facilitation/interference. This model draws heavily on previous accounts of sensorimotor interference and takes into account findings from the stimulus-response compatibility literature.