The ability to navigate across town, comprehend an animated display of the functioning of the human heart, view complex multivariate data on a company's website, or to read an architectural blueprint and form a three-dimensional mental picture of a house are all tasks involving visuospatial thinking. The field of visuospatial thinking is a relatively diverse interdisciplinary research enterprise. An understanding of visuospatial thinking, and in particular, how people represent and process visual and spatial information, is relevant not only to cognitive psychology but also education, geography, architecture, medicine, design computer science/artificial intelligence, semiotics and animal cognition. The goal of this book, first published in 2005, is to present a broad overview of research on visuospatial thinking that can be used by researchers as well as students interested in this topic in both basic research and applied/naturalistic contexts.

Working memory is currently a "hot" topic in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Because of their radically different scopes and emphases, however, comparing different models and theories and understanding how they relate to one another has been a difficult task. This work offers a much-needed forum for systematically comparing and contrasting existing models of working memory. It does so by asking each contributor to address the same comprehensive set of important theoretical questions on working memory. The answers to these questions elucidate the emerging general consensus on the nature of working memory among different theorists and clarify incompatible theoretical claims that must be resolved in future research. As such, this volume serves not only as a milestone that documents the state of the art in the field, but also as a theoretical guidebook that will promote new lines of research and more precise and comprehensive models of working memory.

The ability to navigate across town, comprehend an animated display of the functioning of the human heart, view complex multivariate data on a company's website, or to read an architectural blueprint and form a three-dimensional mental picture of a house are all tasks involving visuospatial thinking. The field of visuospatial thinking is a relatively diverse interdisciplinary research enterprise. An understanding of visuospatial thinking, and in particular, how people represent and process visual and spatial information, is relevant not only to cognitive psychology but also education, geography, architecture, medicine, design computer science/artificial intelligence, semiotics and animal cognition. The goal of this book, first published in 2005, is to present a broad overview of research on visuospatial thinking that can be used by researchers as well as students interested in this topic in both basic research and applied/naturalistic contexts.