Family Form, Desired Parental Involvement and Troubled Ruminations about Fathers and Mothers

This study is an exploration of the relationship between retrospectively perceived desired parental involvement and current troubled ruminations about fathers and mothers by young adults. It investigates the impact of family form on desired parental involvement and troubled ruminations. The data were taken from a larger project (Finley, Mira, & Schwartz, 2008), consisting of 1,714 ethnically diverse, young adult university students. The results show a significant correlation between desired paternal involvement and troubled ruminations about fathers (r= .369,

Sex Differences in Mental Rotation Performance: The Self-fulfilling Prophecy ofGender Stereotypes

Male advantage on spatial tasks may be explained in part by gender stereotypes (Nash 1975). The current studyinvestigated the effect of awareness of sex differences in mental rotation on mental rotation (MR) performance. We hypothe-sized that students with negative stereotypes would score significantly lower than students who were unaware or held positivestereotypes. Participants – 285 undergraduates — completed the Shepard & Metzler (1971) MR task followed by a short onlinesurvey. Preliminary analysis revealed a significant sex difference in mental rotation performance F (1, 256) = 9.68, p=. 002.There was no main effect of awareness on MR performance. Interestingly, there was a significant interaction between sex andawareness on MR performance, F (1,256) =6.77, p=. 010. Results on the role of awareness in cognitive strategy selectionwill be presented. By understanding gender stereotypes associated with spatial ability, we can reduce the gender gap found inSTEM disciplines

Factors Affecting Adult Mental Rotation Performance

Research on mental rotation has consistently found sex differences, with males outperforming females on mental rotation tasks like the Vandenberg and Kuse (1978) mental rotation test (MRT; D. Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995). Mental rotation ability has been found to be enhanced with experience (Nazareth, Herrera & Pruden, 2013) and training (Wright, Thompson, Ganis, Newcombe, & Kosslyn, 2008) and the effects of training have been found to be transferable to other spatial tasks (Wright et al., 2008) and sustainable for months (Terlecki, Newcombe, & Little, 2008). Although, we now are fairly certain about the malleability of spatial tasks and the role of spatial activity experience, we seem to have undervalued an important piece of the puzzle. What is the mechanism by which experiential factors enhance mental rotation performance? In other words, what is it that develops in an individual as a consequence of experience? The current dissertation sought to address this gap in the literature by examining cognitive strategy selection as a possible mechanism by which experiential factors like early spatial activity experience enhance mental rotation performance. A total of 387 adult university students were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions. The three experimental conditions differed in the amount and type of non-spatial information present in the task stimuli. Participant eye movement was recorded using a Tobii X60 eye tracker. Study I investigated the different types of cognitive strategies selected during mental rotation, where eye movement patterns were used as indicators of the underlying cognitive strategies. A latent profile analysis revealed two distinct eye movement patterns significantly predicting mental rotation performance. Study II examined the role of early spatial activity experience in mental rotation performance. Male sex-typed spatial activities were found to significantly mediate the relation between participant sex and mental rotation performance. Finally, Study III examined the developmental role of early spatial activity experience in cognitive strategy selection and strategy flexibility to enhance mental rotation performance. Strategy flexibility was found to be significantly associated with mental rotation performance. Male sex-typed spatial activity experiences were found to be significantly associated with cognitive strategy selection but not strategy flexibility. Implications for spatial training and educational pedagogy in the STEM fields are discussed

Novel methodology to examine cognitive and experiential factors in language development: combining eye-tracking and LENA technology

Developmental systems theory posits that development cannot be segmented by influences acting in isolation, but should be studied through a scientific lens that highlights the complex interactions between these forces over time (Overton, 2013a). This poses a unique challenge for developmental psychologists studying complex processes like language development. In this paper, we advocate for the combining of highly sophisticated data collection technologies in an effort to move toward a more systemic approach to studying language development. We investigate the efficiency and appropriateness of combining eye-tracking technology and the LENA (Language Environment Analysis) system, an automated language analysis tool, in an effort to explore the relation between language processing in early development, and external dynamic influences like parent and educator language input in the home and school environments. Eye-tracking allows us to study language processing via eye movement analysis; these eye movements have been linked to both conscious and unconscious cognitive processing, and thus provide one means of evaluating cognitive processes underlying language development that does not require the use of subjective parent reports or checklists. The LENA system, on the other hand, provides automated language output that describes a child’s language-rich environment. In combination, these technologies provide critical information not only about a child’s language processing abilities but also about the complexity of the child’s language environment. Thus, when used in conjunction these technologies allow researchers to explore the nature of interacting systems involved in language development

Memory for Spatial Locations: An Eye-Tracking Study

Working memory is the ability to store information while also using it to process cognitive tasks. Working memory has very limited capacity. Ropeter and Pauen (2013) found that that infants who had higher working memory also had higher habituation and dishabituation responses compared to infants who had lower scores on working memory. Visuo-spatial tasks are very different from one another; some give greater spatial cues while others might be more complex and may require different spatial working memory capacities. Studies have found sex differences in performance on spatial tasks in subjects as young as four months old (Moore & Johnson, 2008; Quinn & Liben 2008). The present study involved familiarizing infants between 10 months and 24-months with a target object based on Tzuriel and Egozi’s (2010). Stimuli consisted of a house oriented at one of three possible angles, with rattles in 1, 2, or 3 of the windows. In the test trial, infants were shown the same target object during the familiarization phase along with the mirror image of the target object. Our study examines a set of variables thought to affect 13- and 20- month-olds’ ability to represent and remember spatial locations of objects, including the number of objects and degree of rotation of the target object. Our results revealed no significant sex difference in preference between familiar and novel images after familiarization, even when controlling for age. In addition, there were no significant moderating effects of angle of rotation or number of objects presented. Our results suggest that the sex differences observed in mental rotation are not present in infants as early as 20 months. This supports the argument that boys and girls have differential spatial experiences, which may explain sex differences in mental rotation in later years

Does GIScience Training Enhance Spatial Navigation Ability?

Research on the reciprocal influence of spatial thinking and GIScience training is limited (Wakabayashi & Ishikawa,2011). In the current project, we examine improvement in spatial navigation in undergraduates enrolled in GIS classes over thecourse of a semester. Students enrolled in strategic communications (SC), a low-spatial content class, were used as a controlgroup. Fifty students were trained and tested at 2 time points – beginning and end of a semester – in a virtual navigationtask (Silcton; Weisberg, et. al., 2014). We hypothesize that a significantly higher number of GIS students as compared toSC students will be Integrators i.e. they will find the most targets within-route and between-route in the virtual environment.Furthermore, we hypothesize that GIS students will show a significantly greater improvement at time point 2 as compared toSC students. This research has important implications for spatial training and educational pedagogy in STEM disciplines

A New Biomarker to Examine the Role of Hippocampal Function in the Development of Spatial Reorientation in Children: A Review

Spatial navigation is an adaptive skill that involves determining the route to a particular goal or location, and then traveling that path. A major component of spatial navigation is spatial reorientation, or the ability to reestablish a sense of direction after being disoriented. The hippocampus is known to be critical for navigating, and has more recently been implicated in reorienting in adults, but relatively little is known about the development of the hippocampus in relation to these large-scale spatial abilities in children. It has been established that, compared to school-aged children, preschool children tend to perform poorly on certain spatial reorientation tasks, suggesting that their hippocampi may not be mature enough to process the demands of such a task. Currently, common techniques used to examine underlying brain activity, such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are not suitable for examining hippocampal development in young children. In the present paper, we argue instead for the use of eyeblink conditioning (EBC), a relatively under-utilized, inexpensive, and safe method that is easy to implement in developing populations. In addition, EBC has a well defined neural circuitry, which includes the hippocampus, making it an ideal tool to indirectly measure hippocampal functioning in young children. In this review, we will evaluate the literature on EBC and its relation to hippocampal development, and discuss the possibility of using EBC as an objective measure of associative learning in relation to large-scale spatial skills. We support the use of EBC as a way to indirectly access hippocampal function in typical and atypical populations in order to characterize the neural substrates associated with the development of spatial reorientation abilities in early childhood. As such, EBC is a potential, simple biomarker for success in tasks that require the hippocampus, including spatial reorientation

Strategy Selection versus Flexibility:Using Eye-trackers to Investigate Strategy Use during Mental Rotation

Spatial researchers have been arguing over the optimum cognitive strategy for spatial problem-solving for several decades. The current article aims to shift this debate from strategy dichotomies to strategy flexibility-a cognitive process, which although alluded to in spatial research, presents practical methodological challenges to empirical testing. In the current study, participants' eye movements were tracked during a mental rotation task (MRT) using the Tobii x60 eye-tracker. Results of a latent profile analysis, combining different eye movement parameters, indicated two distinct eye-patterns-fixating and switching patterns. The switching eye-pattern was associated with high mental rotation performance. There were no sex differences in eye-patterns. To investigate strategy flexibility, we used a novel application of the changepoint detection algorithm on eye movement data. Strategy flexibility significantly predicted mental rotation performance. Male participants demonstrated higher strategy flexibility than did female participants. Our findings highlight the importance of strategy flexibility in spatial thinking and have implications for designing spatial training techniques. The novel approaches to analyzing eye movement data in the current paper can be extended to research beyond the spatial domain

Sketches and Verbal Descriptions: Indices of Knowledge about SpatialEnvironments? Prompts to Refine Knowledge?

This study investigated sketch maps and written summaries as measures of large-scale spatial representations as wellas learning aids to improve navigation proficiency. One hundred and fifty-six participants explored a virtual environment(VE) comprising independent and connecting routes. Participants were then asked to sketch or write a summary describingthe layout of the VE. A free exploration phase followed in which they could learn more. The testing phase comprised twoobjective measures of navigation proficiency: a pointing task and a model-building task. Sketches provided significantlymore target and route details about the VE than written summaries, although the quality of both correlated with objectivenavigation measures. Thus, both are good measures of spatial representations, despite prior doubts about them. However,neither sketching nor written summaries positively influenced subsequent exploration or spatial learning. Symbolic rep-resentations may not be effective tools for improving navigation skills. Another possibility is that they may be but onlywith further represent-explore-feedback cycles