Publisher Description

The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is the first comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning. Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading. The volume also includes work related to developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, education, law, and medicine. Scholars and students in all these fields and others will find this to be a valuable collection.

Each chapter in this book makes a unique contribution to the body of the literature and enhances the understanding of spatial ability and its influence on learning in the STEM disciplines. It addresses spatial abilities, ways to measure them as well as their impact and how they can affect learning subjects in scientific, technology and engineering domains. The volume deliberately covers a wide range perspectives from cognitive psychology, educational psychology, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, computer science, information technology disciplines to human development. Taking a broad view on the topic, chapters in the book discuss how to define spatial ability and its factors, the measurement of spatial ability and psychometric analyses, and educational strategies to improve spatial skills and their implications for science and technology education. The book thus provides an overview of current thinking about visual-spatial ability, spatial reasoning, and spatial skills.

Do you know things without being able to explain how or why? Do you solve problems in unusual ways? Do you think in pictures rather than in words? If so, you are not alone. One-third of the population thinks in images. You may be one or you may live with one. If you teach, it is absolutely certain that some of your students.

The rise in computing and multimedia technology has spawned an increasing interest in the role of diagrams and sketches, not only for the purpose of conveying information but also for creative thinking and problem-solving. This book attempts to characterise the nature of "a science of diagrams" in a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary study that contains accounts of the most recent research results in computer science and psychology. Key topics include: cognitive aspects, formal aspects, and applications. It is a well-written and indispensable survey for researchers and students in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and graphics and visualisation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 25th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, OzCHI 2013, held in Adelaide, SA, Australia, in November 2013. The 11 revised extended papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 192 submissions and cover topics on multi-dimensional interaction; video gaming; spatial learning; and physical spatial interaction.

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning brings together the contributions of many of the leading researchers in thinking and reasoning to create the most comprehensive overview of research on thinking and reasoning that has ever been available. Each chapter includes a bit of historical perspective on the topic, and concludes with some thoughts about where the field seems to be heading.

An exploration of fascinating scientific research about what intelligence is, where it comes from, and how it might be enhanced.

This book develops the theoretical perspective on visuospatial reasoning in ecocultural contexts, granting insights on how the language, gestures, and representations of different cultures reflect visuospatial reasoning in context. For a number of years, two themes in the field of mathematics education have run parallel with each other with only a passing acquaintance. These two areas are the psychological perspective on visuospatial reasoning and ecocultural perspectives on mathematics education. This volume examines both areas of research and explores the intersection of these powerful ideas. In addition, there has been a growing interest in sociocultural aspects of education and in particular that of Indigenous education in the field of mathematics education. There has not, however, been a sound analysis of how environmental and cultural contexts impact visuospatial reasoning, although it was noted as far back as the 1980s when Alan Bishop developed his duality of visual processing and interpreting visual information. This book provides this analysis and in so doing not only articulates new and worthwhile lines of research, but also uncovers and makes real a variety of useful professional approaches in teaching school mathematics. With a renewed interest in visuospatial reasoning in the mathematics education community, this volume is extremely timely and adds significantly to current literature on the topic.

Visuospatial processing is key to learn and perform professionally in the domains of health and natural sciences. As such, there is accumulating research showing the importance of visuospatial processing for education in diverse health sciences (e.g., medicine, anatomy, surgery) and in many natural sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, physics, geology). In general, visuospatial processing is treated separately as (a) spatial ability and (b) working memory with visuospatial stimuli. This book attempts to link these two research perspectives and present visuospatial processing as the cognitive activity of two components of working memory (mostly the visuospatial sketch pad, and also the central executive), which allows to perform in both spatial ability and working memory tasks. Focusing on university education in the fields of health sciences and natural sciences, the chapters in this book describe the abilities of mental rotation, mental folding, spatial working memory, visual working memory, among others, and how different variables affect them. Some of these variables, thoroughly addressed in the book, are sex (gender), visualizations, interactivity, cognitive load, and embodiment. The book concludes with a chapter presenting VAR, a battery of computer-based tests to measure different tasks entailing visuospatial processing. With contributions by top educational psychologists from around the globe, this book will be of interest to a broad array of readers across the disciplines.