Spatial scaling is an important prerequisite for many spatial tasks and involves an understanding of how distances in different-sized spaces correspond. Previous studies have found evidence for such an understanding in preschoolers; however, the mental processes involved remain unclear. In the present study, we investigated whether children and adults use mental transformations to scale distanc...

Recent research showed that past events are associated with the back and left side, whereas future events are associated with the front and right side of space. These spatial-temporal associations have an impact on our sensorimotor system: thinking about one's past and future leads to subtle body sways in the sagittal dimension of space (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010). In this study we investigat...

The TIME IS SPACE metaphor consists in the use of a spatial mental time line (either left-right or front-back) to represent time. One of the issues still to be resolved is whether these space-time mappings can be automatically activated independently from the goals of the task. Prior attempts to settle this issue have failed to match adequately the temporally relevant and irrelevant tasks. In t...

Large displays are becoming more and more pervasive, and their larger screen sizes provide an opportunity for users to see more information in more windows at the same time, but at the cost of managing a larger amount of screen space. Some methods of automatic window management have been studied with some success. However, they mainly focus on utilization of empty space and ignore preservation ...

Understanding the highly complex, spatially distributed and temporally organized phenomena entailed by mental processes using functional MRI is an important research problem in cognitive and clinical neuroscience. Conventional analysis methods focus on the spatial dimension of the data discarding the information about brain function contained in the temporal dimension. This paper presents a ful...

Evidences demonstrated that verbal information allows to construct a mental representation of space, even for persons who have no previous experience of sight. However, the construction of a mental model from verbal description is not presentation-free, as the verbal description anchors participants to a single perspective. The aim of our study is to test the perspective of spatial representati...

Working memory accounts for the ability of humans to perform cognitive processing, by handling both the representation of information (the mental picture forming the situation awareness) and the space required for processing these information (skill processing). The more complex the skills are, the more processing space they require, the less space becomes available for storage of information. ...

Individuals with 'time-space' synaesthesia have conscious awareness of mappings between time and space (e.g., they may see months arranged in an ellipse, or years as columns or spirals). These mappings exist in the 3D space around the body or in a virtual space within the mind's eye. Our study shows that these extra-ordinary mappings derive from, or give rise to, superior abilities in the two d...

introduction of modern architecture in iran and its popularization in 1950s and after, brought some new concepts in everyday life of iranian women, among which was “kitchen as heart of home-life”. younger members of current generation are grown in these modernized spaces while a bit older ones have experienced houses of traditional style. this study is designed to explore what previous concept ...