Shannon Pruden

Florida International University | FIU · Department of Psychology

Do boys produce more terms than girls to describe the spatial world-that is, dimensional adjectives (e.g., big, little, tall, short), shape terms (e.g., circle, square), and words describing spatial features and properties (e.g., bent, curvy, edge)? If a sex difference in children's spatial-language use exists, is it related to the spatial language...

The hippocampus is a subcortical structure in the medial temporal lobe involved in cognitive functions such as spatial navigation and reorientation, episodic memory, and associative learning. While much is understood about the role of hippocampal function in learning and memory in adults, less is known about the relations between the hippocampus an...

Learning a second language in childhood is inherently advantageous for communication. However, parents, educators and scientists have been interested in determining whether there are additional cognitive advantages. One of the most exciting yet controversial¹ findings about bilinguals is a reported advantage for executive function. That is, several...

The current study explores change in mental rotation skills throughout the pre-kindergarten year in a Hispanic population to better understand the development of early sex differences in mental rotation. Ninety-six Hispanic children (M = 4 years 8 months) completed a mental rotation task at the beginning and end of pre-kindergarten. Results suggest...

Spatial researchers have been arguing over the optimum cognitive strategy for spatial problem-solving for several decades. The current article aims to shift this debate from strategy dichotomies to strategy flexibility—a cognitive process, which although alluded to in spatial research, presents practical methodological challenges to empirical testi...

We investigated the extent to which parents' prosocial talk and negations relate to the quantity and diversity of parents' spatial language production. We also examined similar associations among children. Participants included 51 children of ages 4-7 years and their parents recruited from South Florida. Most of the dyads included mothers and were...

Purpose: Attentional control theory (ACT) posits that elevated anxiety increases the probability of re-allocating cognitive resources needed to complete a task to processing anxiety-related stimuli. This process impairs processing efficiency and can lead to reduced performance effectiveness. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) studen...

The hippocampus is a complex structure composed of distinct subfields. It has been central to understanding neural foundations of episodic memory. In the current cross‐sectional study, using a large sample of 830, 3‐ to 21‐year‐olds from a unique, publicly available dataset we examined the following questions: (1) Is there elevated grey matter volu...

Attentional control theory (ACT) posits that elevated anxiety increases the probability of re-allocating cognitive resources needed to complete a task to processing anxiety-related stimuli. This process impairs processing efficiency and can lead to reduced performance effectiveness. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students frequen...

Identifying factors that contribute to spatial thinking is of great interest given links between spatial thinking and success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Working memory has been found to be predictive of spatial thinking but little research has explored other components of executive function (i.e., inhib...

We investigated the extent to which variability in parent and child prosocial talk and negative talk relates to the quantity and diversity of their spatial language production. Participants included 51 four- to seven-year-old children and their parents. Most of the dyads included mothers and were Hispanic and bilingual. Dyads constructed a Lego hou...

The hippocampus is a complex structure composed of several distinct subfields and has been at the center of scientific study examining the neural foundations of episodic memory. To date, there is little consensus regarding the structural development of the hippocampus and its subfields assessed both volumetrically and through anatomical connectivit...

The current study examined the relations between hippocampal structure (e.g., volume and neurite density) and performance on a trace eye blink conditioning (EBC) task in young children. Our first aim assessed whether individual differences in hippocampal volume were associated with trace EBC performance, using both percent Conditioned Responses (%...

The current study explores whether individual differences in the dimensional adjectives (e.g., big, tall) children understand, relates to individual differences in two non-verbal spatial abilities, an extrinsic spatial task (i.e., spatial scaling) and an intrinsic spatial task (i.e., mental rotation) in two studies that looked at spatial scaling an...

Identifying factors that contribute to spatial thinking is of great interest given links between spatial thinking and success in STEM. Working memory has been found to be predictive of spatial thinking but little research has explored other components of executive function (i.e., inhibition, shifting) in relation to spatial thinking. A total of 131...

Individual differences in children’s spatial ability, both intrinsic and extrinsic, emerge in early childhood, with preschool- and school-age children showing a great deal of variability on spatial tasks that continue throughout life. These individual differences are predictive of children’s mathematics ability and achievement, children’s science a...

Academic performance relies, in part, on intelligence; however, intelligence quotient (IQ) is limited in predicting academic success. Furthermore, while the search for the biological seat of intelligence predates neuroscience itself, its findings remain conflicting. Here, we assess the interplay between IQ, academic performance, and brain connectiv...

Background: Anyone who has ever found themselves lost while driving in an unfamiliar neighborhood or forgotten where they parked their car can appreciate the importance of being able to navigate their environment. Navigation, or wayfinding, is a large-scale spatial ability that involves keeping track of the relative positions of objects and featur...

Abstract Mental rotation ability is associated with successful advances in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and occupations. Meta-analyses have shown consistent sex disparities in mental rotation, where men outperform women on one measure of mental rotation ability, the Mental Rotations Test (MRT). Spatial anxiety,...

This entry discusses how one particular spatial skill, mental rotation, develops. Mental rotation is the ability to rotate two‐ and three‐dimensional objects in space using one's mind. Males consistently outperform females on mental rotation tasks. Mental rotation is a skill linked to success in and entry into the science, technology, engineering,...

Anxiety is known to dysregulate the salience, default mode, and central executive networks of the human brain, yet this phenomenon has not been fully explored across the STEM learning experience, where anxiety can impact negatively academic performance. Here, we evaluated anxiety and large-scale brain connectivity in 101 undergraduate physics stude...

Understanding how students learn is crucial for helping them succeed. We examined brain function in 107 undergraduate students during a task known to be challenging for many students—physics problem solving—to characterize the underlying neural mechanisms and determine how these support comprehension and proficiency. Further, we applied module anal...

Physics is a challenging academic pursuit in which university students regularly struggle to achieve success. Female students tend to perform negatively on introductory physics conceptual assessments compared to their male peers; however, active-learning classroom curricula are known to broadly improve performance on these tests. Here, we used fMRI...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Investigating the factors of designated spatial activity engagement, spatial anxiety, & confidence level to determine which has the greatest effect on sex differences in mental rotation test performance.

Analyzing the interactions between designated spatial activity engagement, spatial anxiety, & confidence level to uncover the direct/indirect effects on sex differences in mental rotation test performance.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Prosody, or the intonation contours of speech, conveys emotion and intention to the listener and provides infants with an early basis for detecting meaning in speech. Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by exaggerated prosody, slower tempo, and elongated pauses, all amodal properties detectable across the face and voice. Although speech i...

Determine whether an individual's confidence belief in mental rotation execution ultimately mediates the relation between the individual's sex & mental rotation test performance.

Understanding how students learn is crucial for helping them succeed. We examined brain function in 107 undergraduate students during a task known to be challenging for many students - physics problem solving - to characterize underlying neural mechanisms and determine how these support comprehension and proficiency. Further, we applied module anal...

Anxiety is known to dysregulate the salience, default mode, and central executive networks of the human brain, yet this phenomenon has not been fully explored across the STEM learning experience, where anxiety can impact negatively academic performance. Here, we evaluated anxiety and large-scale brain connectivity in 101 undergraduate physics stude...

This chapter highlights the benefits of eye-tracking technology in spatial thinking research, specifically in the study of complex cognitive processes used to solve spatial tasks including cognitive strategy selection, cognitive strategy flexibility and spatial language processing. The consistent sex differences found in spatial thinking research (...

Modeling Instruction (MI) for University Physics is a curricular and pedagogical approach to active learning in introductory physics. A basic tenet of science is that it is a model-driven endeavor that involves building models, then validating, deploying, and ultimately revising them in an iterative fashion. MI was developed to provide students a f...

Keywords: Mental Rotation, Spatial Thinking, Spatial Anxiety, Sex Differences, Undergraduates

This chapter highlights the benefits of eye-tracking technology in spatial thinking research, specifically in the study of complex cognitive processes used to solve spatial tasks including cognitive strategy selection, cognitive strategy flexibility and spatial language processing. The consistent sex differences found in spatial thinking research (...

Developmental systems theory posits that development cannot be segmented by influences acting in isolation, but should be studied through a scientific lens that highlights the complex interactions between these forces over time (Overton, 2013a). This poses a unique challenge for developmental psychologists studying complex processes like language d...

Spatial navigation is an adaptive skill that involves determining the route to a particular goal or location, and then travelling that path. A major component of spatial navigation is spatial reorientation, or the ability to reestablish a sense of direction after being disoriented. The hippocampus is known to be critical for navigating, and has mor...

Previous research suggests that the amount of numeracy and spatial language used in the home predicts pre-kindergartners’ numeracy/ spatial skills (Gunderson & Levine, 2011; Pruden, Levine & Huttenlocher, 2011). Given the substantial amount of time pre-kindergarten children spend the classroom, the present study seeks to understand the role of educ...

The current study examined the effect of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), a parent-training intervention for child behavior problems, on child language production. Participants were 46 children (ages 20-70 months) with externalizing behavior problems and with or at risk for developmental delay. Parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to a...

Gender stereotypes—the features andcharacteristics assigned to men andwomen in a particular society—are preva-lent in children as young as the preschoolyears(MartinandRuble,2004).Forexam-ple, preschoolers can categorize toys asappropriate for either girls (e.g., dish-set) or boys (e.g., toolset), and play withthem according to gender expectations(R...

Males consistently outperform females on mental rotation tasks, such as the Vandenberg and Kuse (1978) Perceptual and Motor Skills, 47(2), 599-604, mental rotation test (MRT; e.g. Voyer et al. 1995) in Psychological Bulletin, 117, 250-265. The present study investigates whether these sex differences in MRT scores can be explained in part by early s...

Fundamental to amassing a lexicon of relational terms (i.e., verbs, prepositions) is the ability to abstract and categorize spatial relations such as a figure (e.g., boy) moving along a path (e.g., around the barn). Three studies examine how infants learn to categorize path over changes in manner, or how an action is performed (e.g., running versus...

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty-six English-learning 7- to 9-month-olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a path,...

To learn motion verbs, infants must be sensitive to the specific event features lexicalized in their language. One event feature important for the acquisition of English motion verbs is the manner of motion. This article examines when and how infants detect manners of motion across variations in the figure's path. Experiment 1 shows that 13- to 15-...

This chapter suggests a strong correlation between social and cognitive development. The emergentist coalition model (ECM) is a useful tool in reevaluating our concept of the relationship between social cognition and language in typical populations. The model could aid us in gaining a better understanding of how the behaviours interrelate in atypic...

In this paper we examine the relations between parent spatial language input, children's own production of spatial language, and children's later spatial abilities. Using a longitudinal study design, we coded the use of spatial language (i.e. words describing the spatial features and properties of objects; e.g. big, tall, circle, curvy, edge) from...

This chapter examines how children learn relational terms through the lens of verbs and prepositions. After reviewing evidence that verbs and prepositions are particularly difficult to learn, it examines several hypotheses to explain this disparity. The chapter concludes that although children have the foundations necessary to learn these words, th...

This chapter focuses on what children need to know about events before they learn their first verbs and, more broadly, their first relational terms. Topics covered include when infants begin to perceive, process, and represent actions and spatial relations; the cues used to segment events into meaningful units; research on infants' ability to discr...

This chapter evaluates whether difficulty in analyzing and conceptualizing nonlinguistic events contributes to the documented difficulty in verb learning. It shows that not only can infants discriminate between events based on these components but that they are also capable of forming some categories of events along these lines. Furthermore, there...

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particula...

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Bloom's eloquent and comprehensive treatment of early word learning holds that social intention is foundational for language development. While we generally support his thesis, we call into question two of his proposals: (1) that attention to social information in the environment implies social intent, and (2) that infants are sensitive to social i...

infants younger than 10-months-old are unable to abstract out the invariant path and infants younger than 13-months-old are unable to abstract out the invariant manner. •Research in object categorization shows that linguistic labels play a special role in categorization in

Typescript. Microfiche copy available in Special Collections Dept. Thesis (M.A.)--San Francisco State University, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 43-46).