To succeed in STEM, students need to learn to use visual representations. Most prior research has focused on conceptual knowledge about visual representations that is acquired via verbally mediated forms of learning. However, students also need perceptual fluency: the ability to rapidly and effortlessly translate among representations. Perceptual fluency is acquired via nonverbal, implicit lear...

Does visual imagery engage some of the same representations used in visual perception? The evidence collected by cognitive psychologists in support of this claim has been challenged by three types of alternative explanation: Tacit knowledge, according to which subjects use nonvisual representations to simulate the use of visual representations during imagery tasks, guided by their tacit knowled...

Recommended Citation Niese, Adam Trent. "The Relationship between visual working memory and visual long-term memory. 1 ABSTRACT This dissertation evaluated whether Visual Working Memory (VWM) is a distinct memory system or if it is an activated state of Visual Long Term Memory (VLTM). These two positions suggest different roles for VLTM representations in the performance of VWM. If VWM represen...

This article is a product of a workshop on the Future of Visual Analytics, held in Washington, DC on 4 March 2009. Workshop attendees included representatives from the visual analytics research community across government, industry and academia. The goal of the workshop, and the resulting article, was to reflect on the first 5 years of the visual analytics enterprise and propose research challe...

Anomalies in intertemporal choice (e.g. hyperbolic discounting, subadditive discounting, a sign effect, a magnitude effect, and a delay-speedup asymmetry) have been investigated in neuroeconomics and behavioral neuroeconomics. In this study we propose a “tempospect” theory of intertemporal choice which can account for these anomalies in intertemporal choice. The key features of the present theo...

Although few studies have systematically investigated the relationship between visual mental imagery and visual working memory, work on the effects of passive visual interference has generally demonstrated a dissociation between the two functions. In four experiments, we investigated a possible commonality between the two functions: We asked whether both rely on depictive representations. Parti...

Visual representations are ubiquitous instructional tools in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) domains. The goal of our ongoing research is to develop a new methodology for cognitive modeling of perceptual learning processes so as to create adaptive technologies that support perceptual fluency. We are using metric learning methods to assess which visual features novice students ...

Little is known about the fate of higher level visual perception and visual mental imagery in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we assessed these abilities in a group of mild-to-moderate AD patients using tasks selected to satisfy two main criteria. First, they have been shown to be sensitive to impairments of perception and imagery caused by other neurological condit...