Any system designed to model or simulate narrative intelligence will have to take into account how stories encode mental representations of emergent spatial relationships between items in narrated worlds. Intelligent agents, for example, need to be able to use sequences of referring expressions as cues for making inferences about agents, places, and objects and about the dynamic relations betwe...

A large body of experimental and theoretical work has investigated the role of the cerebellum in adaptive motor control, movement coordination, and Pavlovian conditioning. Recent experimental findings have also begun to unravel the implication of the cerebellum in high-level functions such as spatial cognition. We focus on behavioural genetic data suggesting that cerebellar long-term plasticity...

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This paper aimed to explore whether human beings can understand gestures produced by telepresence robots. If it were the case, they can derive meaning conveyed in telerobotic gestures when processing spatial information. We conducted two experiments over Skype in the present study. Participants were presented with a robotic interface that had arms, which were teleoperated by an experimenter. Th...

Studies of the conceptual structures that support spatial cognition, suggest a common basis for spatial and linguistic memory. Furthermore, studies of route descriptions provide evidence that selecting crucial information units in these directions is based on metacognitive knowledge that is largely independent of a specific environment. In this paper, we investigated spatial memory as revealed ...

7.1 Background Cognitive mapping is defined as "a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of the phenomena in his everyday spatial environment" (Downs & Stea, 1973: 7). Cognitive mapping is usually considered to be a subset of spatial cognition which can be...

People often perform spontaneous body movements during spatial tasks such as giving complex directions or orienting themselves on maps. How are these spontaneous gestures related to spatial problem-solving? We measured spontaneous movements during a perspective-taking task inspired by map reading. Analyzing the motion data to isolate rotation and translation components of motion in specific geo...

The role of the hippocampal formation in spatial cognition is thought to be supported by distinct classes of neurons whose firing is tuned to an organism's position and orientation in space. In this article, we review recent research focused on how and when this neural representation of space emerges during development: each class of spatially tuned neurons appears at a different age, and matur...

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...

This chapter reviews some of the recent experiments investigating spatial cognition that have been predicated on adaptationist hypotheses, specifically that some animals will have faced greater selection pressure on their spatial cognitive abilities than others. In contrast to more traditional experimental psychology, adaptationists seek to explain some of the variation in cognitive abilities, ...