A variety of experimental results have suggested that motor systems can participate in what were thought to be purely perceptual tasks. Extending previous work in the stimulusresponse compatibility paradigm, we show that a representation of a visual stimulus accessed from memory can activate potential motor interactions. Other research has shown that mental images and mental models can have ana...

In this thesis I try to answer the question of how information spaces can be designed so that they support humans in the exploration of a large set of scientific literature items. I will argue that the degree of support increases if the spatial representation assembles the mental representation of a certain spectator. In this regard, I will illustrate how humans build such mental representation...

This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information and the relation between communication and mental representation. Children (8-10 years) and adults walked through a space to learn the locations of six hidden toy animals and then explained the space to another person. In Study 1, older children and adults typically gestured when describing the spa...

A sizable fraction of current research into human visuospatial knowledge processing explicitly or implicitly suggests a spatial processing of certain knowledge types and a visual processing of others. Similarly, many formal and technical approaches for representing and processing visuospatial information in artificial intelligence, in computational cognitive modeling, or in knowledge representa...

There are many simple, everyday tasks, such as following road directions, using instructions to assemble a bicycle, reading a novel, or helping to solve your child’s geometry homework, that seem to entail constructing a spatial mental model from a description. In order to comprehend Go straight till the jrs t light, then turn left, go down about three blocks to Oak, and make a right, it is usef...

Although there is consistent evidence for a deficit in the manipulation and internal representation of space and spatially located objects by the congenitally blind (e.g. Heller, 1989), explanations for this deficit are disputed. In this chapter, two accounts are examined for their ability to explain the experimental data, and recent data from a comparison of blind and sighted participants’ jud...

Dual tasks and their associated delays have often been used to examine the boundaries of processing in the brain. We used the dual-task procedure and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how mental rotation of a first stimulus (S1) influences the shifting of visual-spatial attention to a second stimulus (S2). Visual-spatial attention was monitored by using the N2pc component ...