Models of spatial reasoning often assume distinct visual and spatial representations. In particular, the visual impedance effect – slower response time when more visual details are represented in three-term series spatial reasoning tasks – has been taken as evidence for the distinctive roles of visual and spatial representations. In this paper, we show that a memory model of spreading activatio...

Representations of mathematical concepts are very important in the teaching and learning mathematics. Visual representations used to present solve, explore or explain concepts. The purpose this study was examine undergraduate mathematics education students’ visual multivariable functions using matching items tasks. qualitative research conducted with 10 second-year students at a University Zimb...

We present the results of a between-subjects (n=93) experiment that investigates the effect of different visual design representations on user perceptions of credibility of Wikipedia articles. Users were recruited through Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk system. Participants were randomly assigned to a different condition, corresponding to the visual representation, and were asked a fact-based ques...

Shephard groups are unitary reflection groups arising as the symmetries of regular complex polytopes. For a Shephard group, we identify the representation carried by the principal ideal in the coinvariant algebra generated by the image of the product of all linear forms defining reflecting hyperplanes. This representation turns out to have many equivalent guises making it analogous to the sign ...

The human visual system can be divided into over two-dozen distinct areas, each of which contains a topographic map of the visual field. A fundamental question in vision neuroscience is how the visual system integrates information from the environment across different areas. Using neuroimaging, we investigated the spatial pattern of correlated BOLD signal across eight visual areas on data colle...

How much visual information can we hold in mind at once? A large body of research has attempted to quantify the capacity of visual working memory by focusing on how many individual objects or visual features can be actively maintained in memory. This thesis presents a novel theoretical framework for understanding working memory capacity, suggesting that our memory representations are complex an...

Neurophysiological evidence for invariant representations of objects and faces in the primate inferior temporal visual cortex is described. Then a computational approach to how invariant representations are formed in the brain is described that builds on the neurophysiology. A feature hierarchy model in which invariant representations can be built by self-organizing learning based on the tempor...

It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual representations contribute functionally to concrete word ...

Emotions have been shown to modulate low-level visual processing of simple stimuli. In this study, we investigate whether emotions only modulate processing of visual representations created from direct visual inputs or whether they also modulate representations that underlie visual mental images. Our results demonstrate that when participants visualize or look at the global shape of written wor...

A variety of similarities between visual and haptic object recognition suggests that the two modalities may share common representations. However, it is unclear whether such common representations preserve low-level perceptual features or whether transfer between vision and haptics is mediated by high-level, abstract representations. Two experiments used a sequential shape-matching task to exam...