Research has shown experimentally that if children are taught to use language to create distance (socially, physically, and temporarily) when they revisit a potentially traumatic experience they reduce the intensity of their emotions. Building on this, this study was carried out to explore whether children with better spatial skills are better at such downregulation because of their very aptitude in understanding the concept of distance. Using data from a general-population birth cohort in the UK, the study examined the bidirectional association between emotional dysregulation and spatial ability among children aged 5 and 7 years. The findings reveal a significant reciprocal relationship even after adjusting for family, contextual, and individual confounders including verbal ability: spatial skills at age 5 years were inversely related to emotional dysregulation at age 7 years, and conversely, greater emotional dysregulation at age 5 years was associated with poorer spatial ability at age 7 years. The two paths were equally strong and there was no evidence of differences between them on the basis of sex. Our results suggest that enhancing spatial abilities could be a potential avenue for supporting emotion regulation in middle childhood.

Single housing is believed to be chronically stressful and to have a negative impact on welfare and cognition in rats (Rattus norvegicus). However, single housing does not consistently evoke stress-like responses nor does it consistently impair cognitive performance. In an experiment in which all cages were separated by an opaque barrier, single- and pair-housed pigmented (dark-eyed) rats performed equally in a cognitive test and displayed similar levels of anxiety during testing. Additionally, bar biting in the home cage did not differ between the two groups. Stress levels both during cognitive testing and in the home cage were higher than those we have previously reported when rats were housed without opaque barriers between the cages. We conclude that visual interactions between rats in different cages may be of sufficient significance that single housing in a cage with a view to neighbouring rats and to the rest of the laboratory holding room may be preferable to pair housing in a cage without this view.

Wayfinding skills decay in old age, more so for wayfinding in an allocentric than an egocentric reference frame. This study investigates whether wayfinding deficits of schoolchildren mimic those of older adults. Schoolchildren were tested on two wayfinding tasks: one could only be mastered in an allocentric, and the other only in an egocentric reference frame. The results were compared with those from a previous study of young and older adults who had been tested on the same two wayfinding tasks. It was found that wayfinding performance improved somewhat from school age to young adulthood and that this improvement proceeded more or less in parallel for the allocentric and the egocentric tasks. It was further found that wayfinding performance decayed from young to older adulthood and that this decay was more dramatic for the allocentric than for the egocentric task. This pattern of findings does not support the hypothesis that the wayfinding performance of schoolchildren mimics that of older adults.

The languages of the world differ in their use of intrinsic, relative, and absolute reference frames to describe spatial relationships, but factors guiding reference frame choices are not yet well understood. This paper addresses the role of animacy and linguistic construction in reference frame choices in English and Spanish. During each trial of two experiments, adult participants saw a spatial scene along with a sentence describing the location of an object (locatum) relative to another object (relatum) that was animate or human(-like) to varying degrees. The scene presented two possible referents for the locatum, and participants decided which referent the description referred to, revealing which reference frame they used to interpret the sentence. Results showed that reference frame choices differed systematically between languages. In English, the non-possessive construction (X is to the left of Y) was consistently associated with the relative reference frame, and the possessive construction (X is on Y’s left) was associated with the intrinsic reference frame. In Spanish, the intrinsic interpretation was dominant throughout, except for the non-possessive construction with relata that were not anthropomorphic, animate, or human. We discuss the results with respect to the languages’ syntactic repertory, and the notion of inalienable possession.

This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of a constraint on the use on intrinsic frames of reference proposed by Levelt (1984, 1996). This proposed constraint claims that use of intrinsic frames when the ground object is in non-canonical position is blocked due to conflict with gravitational-based reference frames. Regression models of the data from Arabic, K’iche’, Spanish, Yucatec, and Zapotec suggest that this constraint is valid across languages. However, the strength at which the constraint operates is predicted by the frequency of canonical intrinsic frames in the particular language. The ratio of the incidence of intrinsic usage with canonical vs. non-canonical orientation appears to be remarkably uniform across languages, which suggests the possibility of a strong cognitive universal.

Functional hemodynamic response was studied in a new Verbal Fluency Task (VFT) that demanded the production of geographical words while fMRI data was obtained. Participants completed 7 trials with a total duration of 2 min. 20 s. Four simple arithmetic subtraction trials were alternated with 3 geographical naming trials. Each trial had a duration of 20 s. Brain activity was contrasted between both conditions and significant differences (p < .05, Family Wise Error correction) were observed in the prefrontal medial gyrus, typically associated with word retrieval and phonological awareness, and in the parahippocampal gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex and lingual gyrus, areas related to spatial cognition. These results indicate that geographic VFT could be incorporated into a browser of cognitive processes using VFT considering its specific relationship with spatial cognition. Further investigations are proposed, taking special interest in the gender variable and eliminating phonological restrictions, because the evoked Argentinean cities and towns ended in a consonant letter.

The study of spatial cognition has provided considerable insight into how animals (including humans) navigate on the horizontal plane. However, the real world is three-dimensional, having a complex topography including both horizontal and vertical features, which presents additional challenges for representation and navigation. The present article reviews the emerging behavioral and neurobiological literature on spatial cognition in non-horizontal environments. We suggest that three-dimensional spaces are represented in a quasi-planar fashion, with space in the plane of locomotion being computed separately and represented differently from space in the orthogonal axis – a representational structure we have termed “bicoded.” We argue that the mammalian spatial representation in surface-travelling animals comprises a mosaic of these locally planar fragments, rather than a fully integrated volumetric map. More generally, this may be true even for species that can move freely in all three dimensions, such as birds and fish. We outline the evidence supporting this view, together with the adaptive advantages of such a scheme.

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by severe visuospatial deficits, particularly affecting spatial navigation and wayfinding. Creating egocentric (viewer-dependent) and allocentric (viewer-independent) representations of space is essential for the development of these abilities. However, it remains unclear whether egocentric and allocentric representations are impaired in WS. In this study, we investigate egocentric and allocentric frames of reference in this disorder. A WS group (n = 18), as well as a chronological age-matched control group (n = 20), a non-verbal mental age-matched control group (n = 20) and a control group with intellectual disability (n = 17), was tested with a computerized and a 3D spatial judgment task. The results showed that WS participants are impaired when performing both egocentric and allocentric spatial judgments even when compared with mental age-matched control participants. This indicates that a substantial deficit affecting both spatial representations is present in WS. The egocentric impairment is in line with the dorsal visual pathway deficit previously reported in WS. Interestingly, the difficulties found in performing allocentric spatial judgments give important cues to better understand the ventral visual functioning in WS. (JINS, 2013, 19, 1–9)

The neural representation of peripersonal space may be distinct from the representation of extrapersonal space. Sex differences in the performance of motor tasks might relate to proximity to the body. In the spatial domain, females excel at tasks performed in peripersonal space, like the Object Location Memory Task (OLMT), whereas males excel at tasks performed in extrapersonal space, such as navigation. We compared performance on the OLMT in peripersonal space with performance on the same task in extrapersonal space (using a between-subjects design). As predicted, the typical female advantage was observed for the peripersonal OLMT. However, for the extrapersonal OLMT, the female advantage disappeared and males actually outperformed females. These results suggest that the sex differences observed in the OLMT, and potentially other tasks that exhibit sex differences in performance, may be related to sex differences to spatial-motor systems that are preferentially tuned to proximity. (JINS, 2007, 13, 683–686.)

This study directly compared how well Korsakoff patients can process spatial and temporal order information in memory under conditions that included presentation of only a single feature (i.e., temporal or spatial information), combined spatiotemporal presentation, and combined spatiotemporal order recall. Korsakoff patients were found to suffer comparable spatial and temporal order recall deficits. Of interest, recall of a single feature was the same when only spatial or temporal information was presented compared to conditions that included combined spatiotemporal presentation and recall. In contrast, control participants performed worse when they have to recall both spatial and temporal order compared to when they have to recall only one of these features. These findings together indicate that spatial and temporal information are not automatically integrated. Korsakoff patients have profound problems in coding the feature at hand. Moreover, their lower recall of both features at the same time suggests that Korsakoff patients are impaired in binding different contextual attributes together in memory. (JINS, 2006, 12, 327–336.)

Archaeology can provide two bodies of information relevant to the understanding of the evolution of human cognition – the timing of developments, and the evolutionary context of these developments. The challenge is methodological. Archaeology must document attributes that have direct implications for underlying cognitive mechanisms. One example of such a cognitive archaeology is found in spatial cognition. The archaeological record documents an evolutionary sequence that begins with ape-equivalent spatial abilities 2.5 million years ago and ends with the appearance of modern abilities in the still remote past of 400,000 years ago. The timing of these developments reveals two major episodes in the evolution in spatial ability, one, 1.5 million years ago and the other, one million years later. The two episodes of development in spatial cognition had very different evolutionary contexts. The first was associated with the shift to an open country adaptive niche that occurred early in the time range of Homo erectus. The second was associated with no clear adaptive shift, though it does appear to have coincided with the invasion of more hostile environments and the appearance of systematic hunting of large mammals. Neither, however, occurred in a context of modern hunting and gathering.

When required to locate places on outline maps, males consistently perform more accurately than females. This sex difference in geographical knowledge has been observed in samples throughout the United States, in all age ranges examined from the second to the 9th decade of life and in samples differing in average education level from high school to postgraduate degrees. Both males and females appear to acquire geographical knowledge during surface travel through the environment. The information acquired during everyday travel is apparently integrated into topographic representations that comprise a cognitive map. This process is less efficient in females probably because they attend to and remember more about landmarks and less about distance and directional cues than do males. To examine the importance of driving experience on the ability to locate places on an outline map of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, adolescents who were too young to drive and older persons with varying amounts of experience traveling in the metropolitan area were studied. In the present study the magnitude of the sex difference in accuracy, though not the absolute level of performance, was similar in groups of people too young to drive and in younger and older drivers. Hence, the sex difference in geographical knowledge cannot be the product of differences in driving that may exist between males and females. (JINS, 2002, 8, 804–810.)