People use geometric cues to form spatial categories. This study investigated whether people also use the spatial distribution of exemplars. Adults pointed to remembered locations on a tabletop. In Experiment 1, a target was placed in each geometric category, and the location of targets was varied. Adults' responses were biased away from a midline category boundary toward geometric prototypes located at the centers of left and right categories. Experiment 2 showed that prototype effects were not influenced by cross-category interactions. In Experiment 3, subsets of targets were positioned at different locations within each category. When prototype effects were removed, there was a bias toward the center of the exemplar distribution, suggesting that common categorization processes operate across spatial and object domains.

The goal of this study was to specify how executive functioning components predict reading, mathematics, and theory of mind performance during the elementary years. A sample of 93 7- to 10-year-old children completed measures of working memory, inhibition, flexibility, reading, mathematics, and theory of mind. Path analysis revealed that all three executive functioning components (working memory, inhibition, and flexibility) mediated age differences in reading comprehension, whereas age predicted mathematics and theory of mind directly. In addition, reading mediated the influence of executive functioning components on mathematics and theory of mind, except that flexibility also predicted mathematics directly. These findings provide important details about the development of executive functioning, reading, mathematics, and theory of mind during the elementary years.

Two experiments investigated the role of spatial prototypes in estimates of location. In Experiment 1 (N = 144), children and adults learned the locations of 20 objects in an open, square box designed to look like a model house. In two conditions, opaque lines or walls divided the house into four regions, and in the other condition, no boundaries were present. Following learning, the dots marking the locations were removed, and participants attempted to replace the objects. Children and adults overestimated distances between target locations in different regions. Contrary to Huttenlocher, Hedges, and Duncan's hierarchical theory of spatial memory, none of the groups displaced the objects toward the region centers. In Experiment 2 (N = 96), boundaries were removed during testing to determine whether children and adults were more likely to displace objects toward region centers when uncertainty about location increased. Again, all age groups overestimated distances between target objects in different regions. In addition, adults and 11-year-olds in the most salient boundary condition displaced objects toward the region centers. Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for understanding how children and adults estimate location.

We investigated the efficiency with which men and women find their way to novel destinations using directions containing landmarks or cardinal descriptors and how such wayfinding performance is related to differences in spatial anxiety and wayfinding strategies. In two experiments, participants navigated through a model town using landmark or cardinal directions. Men and women were faster and more accurate when navigating based on cardinal directions than when navigating based on landmark directions. In addition, participants who reported greater spatial anxiety made significantly more navigation errors. As reliance on orientation strategies increased, navigation efficiency increased, suggesting that wayfinding strategies are related to navigation performance. These findings are discussed in relation to broader theoretical ideas concerning the dynamics of wayfinding processes.

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