Female advantage in verbal learning revisited: a HUNT study.

The argument for a female advantage in word list learning is often based on partial observations that focus on a single component of the task. Using a large sample (N = 4403) of individuals 13-97 years of age from the general population, we investigated whether this advantage is consistently reflected in learning, recall, and recognition and how other cognitive abilities differentially support word list learning. A robust female advantage was found in all subcomponents of the task. Semantic clustering mediated the effects of short-term and working memory on long-delayed recall and recognition, and serial clustering on short-delayed recall. These indirect effects were moderated by sex, with men benefiting more from reliance on each clustering strategy than women. Auditory attention span mediated the effect of pattern separation on true positives in word recognition, and this effect was stronger in men than in women. Men had better short-term and working memory scores, but lower auditory attention span and were more vulnerable to interference both in delayed recall and recognition. Thus, our data suggest that auditory attention span and interference control (inhibition), rather than short-term or working memory scores, semantic and/or serial clustering on their own, underlie better performance on word list learning in women.

Orientation in physical reasoning: determining the edge that would be formed by two surfaces.

Physical reasoning is strongly influenced by various parameters of orientation. The authors report 3 experiments in which this phenomenon was explored for a particularly elementary transformation: the formation of a line from the intersection of 2 planes. Participants perceived pairs of planar surfaces (disks) in a variety of orientations in 3-D space and indicated the orientations of the edges that would result if the surfaces interpenetrated. The ranges of error and response time were large. Performance depended on whether the orientation of the edge that would be formed was the same as components of the orientations of the perceived surfaces, the degree to which the orientation of the edge would be canonical in the environment, and whether the angle between the surfaces would be perpendicular. The results are discussed in the context of a general approach to orientation in perception and physical reasoning.

Mental imagery as the adaptationist views it.

Mental images are one of the more obvious aspects of human conscious experience. Familiar idioms such as "the mind's eye" reflect the high status of the image in metacognition. Theoretically, a defining characteristic of mental images is that they can be analog representations. But this has led to an enduring puzzle in cognitive psychology: How do "mental pictures" fit into a general theory of cognition? Three empirical problems have constituted this puzzle: The incidence of mental images has been unpredictable, innumerable ordinary concepts cannot be depicted, and images typically do not resemble things well. I argue in this paper that theorists have begun to address these problems successfully. I argue further that the critical theoretical framework involves thinking of mental images as information within a cognitive system that is fundamentally adaptive. The main outline of the adaptationist framework was evident in the school of thought known as American Functionalism, but adaptationism has formed a consistent pattern of theorizing across many authors and decades. I briefly describe Functionalism and then present seven basic claims about imagery that were common in the years before the predominance of behaviorism. I then show how these claims have reappeared and been further articulated in modern cognitive psychology. I end with a brief integration of some of the basic elements of an adaptationist theory of imagery.

Limits on the comprehension of rotational motion: mental imagery of rotations with oblique components.

Mental imagery of rotational motion across variation in the orientation of a square to an axis of rotation, the orientation of the axis to the environment/viewer, and the starting orientation of the rotation were investigated in three experiments. The experimental method included specifying the particular rotations that subjects should consider and obtaining exact predictions of the outcomes of the rotations. When the square was normal to the axis and the axis was normal to the environment/viewer, performance was excellent. When either of these relationships was oblique, performance was quite good. When both of these relationships were oblique, nearly every subject made large errors on every problem. The difficulty of the double-oblique rotations was reduced when the initial orientation of the square was not canonical. Current views of the comprehension of rotational motion are discussed. It appears that the comprehension of rotational motion can be understood as an organizaiton of the symmetric space traced out by the motion. People succeed in organizing this space when it is aligned with a principal spatial reference system.

The generalized cone in human spatial organization.

The generalized cone is one of the newer concepts useful for describing spatial structures, and it has become popular as a volumetric primitive in models of object recognition. Apart from this use of the concept (or perhaps underlying it), the generalized cone can be considered a species of spatial regularity. In the general definition of symmetry as invariance across transformation, the generalized cone is a combination of translation and dilation symmetry. In such symmetry, there is homogeneity both of the slants of edges and surfaces of an object about an axis and the radial positions of these features about the axis. The results of two research projects are reviewed suggesting that the generalized cone is useful in human spatial organization. In the first instance, each of the three simpler regular polyhedra, the Platonic Solids, are easiest to perceive and imaging when they are organized as generalized cones. In the second instance, people imagine simple rotations best when the symmetric space that would be traced by the motion is aligned with salient spatial reference systems.

Reports of mental imagery in retrieval from long-term memory.

Phenomenal reports were obtained immediately after participants retrieved information from long-term memory. Data were gathered for six basic forms of memory (semantic, generic perceptual, recollective, motor skill, rote skill, cognitive skill) and for three forms of memory that asked for declarative information about procedural tasks (motor-declarative, rote-declarative, cognitive-declarative). The data show consistent reports of mental imagery during retrieval of information from the generic perceptual, recollective, motor-declarative, rote-declarative, and cognitive-declarative categories; much less imagery was reported for the semantic, motor, rote, and cognitive categories. Overall, the data provide support for the theoretical framework outlined in Brewer and Pani (1983).

Spatial reference systems in the comprehension of rotational motion.

In certain simple rotations of objects, the orientation of the axis and planes of rotation can determine whether people are able to visualize the motion or perceive it as simple and coherent. This finding affords the opportunity to investigate the spatial reference systems used to define the orientation of the axis and planes of rotation. The results of two experiments suggest that the permanent environment is the primary reference system, apart from the rotating object, used for this purpose. Subjects also were able to use a local spatial environment to determine the orientation of the motion; some subjects were particularly adept at this. The viewer perspective, in contrast, was irrelevant as a reference system in these experiments. These results argue strongly for the primacy of environmental reference systems in the perception and imagination of orientation and extend the set of findings common between the comprehension of rotational motion and orientation-sensitive form perception.

Imagining projective transformations: aligned orientations in spatial organization.

Four experiments were conducted to investigate whether variations in orientation that profoundly affect the ability to imagine rotations also affect the ability to imagine projective transformations. For a basic rectilinear object and the three simpler Platonic Solids, imagining projective transformations (e.g., the casting of a shadow) was quite successful when the objects were aligned with the direction of projection. For the solids, this alignment occurred when the objects were generalized cylinders about axes aligned with the projection. As the objects were made more oblique to the projection, performance deteriorated markedly. When the objects were moderately aligned with the projection, performance depended on the orientation of the object and the orientation of the projection to the environment. We suggest that the imagination of projection and of rotation is a type of problem solving in which spatial structures are organized in relation to initially given properties of the objects and transformations. When there is alignment among the various structural components, this process of imagination works efficiently. Without such alignment, nonexperts often fail. We suggest that aligned (i.e., parallel and perpendicular) orientations are effective in spatial imagination because they are categorically distinct and singular, and they provide a critical form of redundancy.