Spatial abilities and their developmental trajectory are an important part of human intelligence and have been the subject of numerous studies, including mental rotation and perspective taking. However, little is known about these processes in under-represented populations. Here we report a study on 10-year-old children in such a context who participated in four spatial tasks – animal picture mental rotation, abstract figures mental rotation, memory for object location, and picture perspective taking. Results revealed no male advantage on any task, and better performance in the abstract figures task for girls following an alternative school program in mathematics. Furthermore, the analysis found no correlation between the mental rotation and perspective taking performance. Research on under-represented populations is an important drive towards greater generalizability of findings and conclusions.

There is growing interest in exploring the interaction of semantics with outlier information sources in sentence processing. Tliis study explores the role of noun animacy in these processes in combination with syntactic (word order) and morphological (mmiber marking) factors by means of an on-line agency assignment task in Bulgarian. Unlike smiilar studies, the preparation of the stimuli follows a rigorous series of pro-tests which reveal the gradable nature of animacy and attempt to account for the interaction of verb semantics (agency reversibility) with noun semantics (anmiacy contrast). Results confirm expectations of tlie high significance of agreement in Bulgarian and present a challenge to the binary view of animacy. Some of tire predictions on cue interaction within the Competition Model are put to the test and generally confirmed.

We examined the role of spatial frames of reference in memory. Participants first verified verbal descriptions of visualscenes and spatial relations among objects. The intrinsic and relative frames of reference (FoR) were used in the descriptionswith varying degrees of frequency (availability) and veridicality (reliability). Descriptions in the two reference frames couldeither be equally distributed in terms of validity or were biased towards one of the two spatial frames. Participants’ performanceon the memory task was sensitive to priming from the spatial FoRs and their information distribution characteristics. Thesefindings provide evidence that spatial frames of reference can influence spatial memory and that this influence depends onthe frequency of use of a given frame of reference and on the frequency with which it is associated with valid and reliableinformation.