Successful interaction with the environment depends upon our ability to retain and update visuo-spatial information of both front and back egocentric space. Several studies have observed that healthy people tend to show a displacement of the egocentric frame of reference towards the left. However representation of space behind us (back space) has never been systematically investigated in health...

The body specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009) posits that the way in which people interact with the world affects their mental representation of information. For instance, right- versus left-handedness affects the mental representation of affective valence, with right-handers categorically associating good with rightward areas and bad with leftward areas, and left-handers doing the opposite...

Recent cognitive models of numerical abilities have postulated that number processing may in part rely on a representation of quantities where magnitude is organized by spatial proximity, along a "mental number line" extending from left to right. We describe four experiments that examined whether such a spatial representation of number would be affected by the presence of unilateral neglect aft...

Patients with left-sided visuospatial neglect, typically after damage to the right parietal lobe, show a systematic bias towards larger numbers when asked to bisect a numerical interval. This has been taken as further evidence for a spatial representation of numbers, perhaps akin to a mental number line with smaller numbers represented to the left and larger numbers to the right. Previously, co...

A scene prime can induce a mental representation of layout that is functional in the sense that it facilitates the processing of depth relations in a subsequent same-scene target. Five experiments indicated that the representation can consist of separate and independent functional regions. In each experiment, primes with as many as four unrelated regions facilitated spatial processing within ea...

Through the preferential pairing of response positions to pitch, here we show that the internal representation of pitch height is spatial in nature and affects performance, especially in musically trained participants, when response alternatives are either vertically or horizontally aligned. The finding that our cognitive system maps pitch height onto an internal representation of space, which ...

It is a widely-held view that cognition is based on internal representations of the world, and that reasoning can be seen as manipulation of these representations. Instead of developing and describing a formal model of internal representations and processes of reasoning, we will propose two unifying principles of successful, e cient and cognitively adequate reasoning systems, namely the hybrid ...

Research in the field of spatial cognition has advocated a frame of reference (FOR) -based cognitive representation system to account for human’s spatial reasoning and navigation capacities. It has been argued that such mental models may also contribute to the underlying mechanisms of Theory of Mind (ToM). In the present study, we investigated how people made rapid judgments about the number of...