A growing body of evidence has suggested that time, from early to late, or from past to future, was represented in a spatially oriented mental time line. However, little is known about its characteristics. The present study provided the first empirical evidence to explore the symmetry of spatial representations of past and future in the mental time line. Specifically, we compared the Spatial-Te...

What is the relationship between spatial language and abstract concepts? When people talk about abstract things that they can never see or touch, they often use spatial metaphors (e.g., a long vacation, a high price, a close friendship). According to theories of metaphorical mental representation, linguistic metaphors reflect underlying mental metaphors. Yet, behavioral experiments show that th...

The purpose of the present study is twofold: the first objective is to evaluate the importance of visual experience for the ability to form a spatial representation (spatial mental model) of fairly elaborate spatial descriptions. Secondly, we examine whether blind people exhibit the same preferences (i.e. level of performance on spatial tasks) as sighted people in processing the type of perspec...

Spatial representations, when used well, support learning in reading, mathematics, and science. They also enable mental simulations and visualizations that prompt innovation and scientific discovery. Spatial representations, both external drawings and internal images, exploit people's sophisticated perceptual-motor system. The embodiment of thought in perceptual processes has promising implicat...

Previous studies that investigated the association of numbers and space in humans came to contradictory conclusions about the spatial character of the mental number magnitude representation and about how it may be influenced by unilateral spatial neglect. The present study aimed to disentangle the debated influence of perceptual vs. representational aspects via explicit mapping of numbers onto ...

Humans differ substantially in their ability to imagine spatial transformations of novel stimuli (i.e., mental rotation). Whereas "high-spatial" individuals are able to maintain high-quality representations even after complex mental transformations, "low-spatial" individuals often experience substantial degradation of the initial representation. Even though subdivisions of the posterior parieta...

The aim of this research was to investigate how spatial self-assessments and spatial cognitive abilities jointly influence the construction of mental representations derived from spatial descriptions. Two studies were conducted using the path models approach to test to what extent spatial self-assessments (Study 1, 194 participants) and the combination of the latter with spatial abilities (Stud...

We investigated whether the alignment effect (Levine et al, 1982 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 111 157-175) is influenced by mental rotation abilities. In two experiments, groups of undergraduate students with high and low performance in mental rotation tasks were required to study either schematic (experiment 1) or more complex (experiment 2) maps, and to perform a number of poin...

Spatial reasoning has a relevant role in mathematics and helps daily computational activities. It is widely assumed that in cultures with left-to-right reading, numbers are organized along the mental equivalent of a ruler, the mental number line, with small magnitudes located to the left of larger ones. Patients with right brain damage can disregard smaller numbers while mentally setting the mi...