
Yingying YangMontclair State University · Department of Psychology
Yingying Yang
Ph.D.
About
59
Publications
7,476
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
366
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - present
June 2015 - June 2017
September 2010 - May 2015
Education
August 2010 - May 2015
July 2006 - June 2010
Publications
Publications (59)
Previous studies have reported sex differences in wayfinding performance among adults. Men are typically better at using Euclidean information and survey strategies while women are better at using landmark information and route strategies. However, relatively few studies have examined sex differences in wayfinding in children. This research investi...
Contextual cueing refers to a form of implicit spatial learning where participants incidentally learn to associate a target location with its repeated spatial context. Successful contextual learning produces an efficient visual search through familiar environments. Despite the fact that children exhibit the basic ability of implicit spatial learnin...
This research proposes a new framework called interpersonally oriented parental emotion socialization (inter-PES) practices to address parental socialization of adolescents’ interpersonal emotional processing. This framework captures parents’ interpersonal perspectives when their adolescent children experience negative emotions resulting from socia...
Impactful, high-quality, and innovative research in intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) is built upon rigorous research methods. Different from those commonly used in the study of a general, neurotypical sample, there are unique issues, challenges, and opportunities in IDD research methods. Here, we briefly reviewed common IDD researc...
Parent–adolescent emotion dynamics have attracted increasing attention in recent years because adolescence is a challenging period for both adolescents and parents. However, how emotions are coconstructed between parents and adolescents is less clear. This study examined whether mothers' and adolescents' emotion regulation strategy was linked with...
Spatial abilities play a prevalent role in the development of numerous independent living skills (Shea, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2001). These abilities are not formally taught in schools and rather develop through experience. Mental rotation, a type of spatial ability, is the ability to mentally manipulate the shape of an object to view how it would app...
Spatial abilities allow one to comprehend, manipulate, and navigate the spatial environments of our physical worlds (Montello, 2015). It is used in a variety of common tasks, such as remembering directions, folding laundry, and cleaning. Spatial abilities of people with Down Syndrome (DS) have been fairly understudied (Yang et al., 2014). However,...
Mental rotation (MR) is the ability to visualize an object’s new orientation after a mental transformation. It is an important spatial ability that is commonly used in various aspects of daily functioning. Past research suggests that MR can be enhanced in children through experience with tasks such as puzzle games. The current study included 22 par...
Spatial ability is the basis for many skills required for independent living (Park, et al., 2000). These
capabilities are not formally taught (National Academy of Sciences, 2006), but generally acquired
through experience. Experience with spatial tasks promotes spatial ability improvement in typically
developing children (Levine, et al., 2012), yet...
Mental rotation (MR) is the ability to mentally manipulate an object. Previous studies involving children have found that MR predicts STEM success, boys typically outperform girls and these abilities are first exhibited around the age of 5 years old. However, MR is a cognitively demanding task that is often redundant and boring for children. This s...
Spatial abilities are vital in the comprehension, manipulation, and navigation of physical environments (Montello, 2015). The present study focuses on indirect training of perspective-taking performance. Twenty-nine children between the ages of five to nine participated in this study. Participants completed two initial assessments designed to measu...
The global workforce faces a common problem: women are underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. Based on goal congruity theory, the present study examined Chinese college students' career interests. In Study 1, a total of 413 Science/Engineering and Medicine/Business majors chose between two jobs: on...
This research aimed to distinguish person minimization from emotion minimization in Chinese families with adolescent children. In Study 1, a scale was developed to assess two types of minimization through expert evaluations (Mage = 35.05 years, 89.47% females) and factor analyses of mothers’ reported minimization (n = 417, Mage = 42.73 years). Stud...
Background
Spatial abilities are fundamental cognitive abilities, have direct applications in daily life, serve as a cognitive foundation for many other complex skills and are used in many specialty jobs. The current study aimed to systematically and comprehensively evaluate the spatial abilities of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) relative to m...
Visuospatial perspective taking (VPT) refers to the process of mentally representing a viewpoint different from one’s own. It is related to mental rotation and theory of mind and helps to support some complex spatial activities such as wayfinding. Despite research advances in spatial cognition, little is known about VPT in people with Down syndrome...
Navigation aids can help people conduct daily wayfinding activities. However, because of cognitive limitations that can emerge with age, it is not clear how different navigation aids impact wayfinding behaviors and spatial memory in older adults. In Experiment 1, 66 older adults and 65 younger adults participated. They were asked to make turn decis...
Spatial abilities, particularly spatial perspective-taking, are critical components of carrying out day-to-day activities (Newcombe & Shipley, 2015; Newcombe et al., 2013; Uttal et al., 2013). Spatial perspective-taking involves understanding objects’ orientation to one another in the environment. The current study focuses on improving perspective-...
Mental rotation is the ability to mentally spin and manipulate the shape of an object (Shepard & Metzler, 1971). This skill is pertinent to everyday life in activities such as loading a dishwasher or packing a car. Mental rotation abilities have been found to be malleable as training provides long term benefits for children and adults (Uttal et al....
Introduction
Extensive research has shown a close relationship between spatial abilities and success in STEM disciplines because many STEM problems often require students to reason about spatial information. Everyday spatial behaviors may predate and facilitate the development of spatial skills. Therefore, the current study examined children’s ever...
Spatial abilities, particularly mental rotation, are crucial for the development of important living skills and are associated with proficiency within the STEM fields (Shea et al., 2001). Research has linked increased spatial play with spatial development (Jirout & Newcombe, 2015). Previous research has indicated that mental rotation can be improve...
Individual ability to effectively provide direction is reliant on the efficacy of relevant spatial understanding. Environmental information can be expressed via giving accurate directions. Blades (1992) has found that young children are unable to provide effective route directions, while older adolescents are by including information about relevant...
Wayfinding refers to the process of locating unseen destinations in the spatial environment and is an important spatial skill for children. Despite a growing interest in wayfinding development in children, less attention has been focused on documenting the vast methodological heterogeneity of the existing research body, which impacts the ability to...
Spatial abilities, including perspective taking and mental rotation, are crucial for the development of important living skills. Previous studies have demonstrated improvement of these abilities through experience tasks in typically developing (TD) children. This study explores using accessible online materials to train spatial abilities in TD chil...
Parents provide important insights into the psychology, behaviors, and activities of themselves and their children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). However, it is unknown how prevalent parental participation in IDD research is in general, nor the diversity of geographical locations and research methods of these studies with p...
Relatively few studies have directly examined children’s memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to 7...
In visual statistical learning (VSL), one can extract and exhibit memory for the statistical regularities of target locations in an incidental manner. The current study examined the development of VSL using the probability cueing paradigm with salient perceptual cues. We also investigated the elicited attention gradient phenomenon in VSL. In a visu...
Although memory functions in people with Down Syndrome (DS) have been studied extensively, how well people with DS remember things about everyday life is not well understood. In the current study, 31 adolescents/young adults with DS and 26 with intellectual disabilities (ID) of mixed etiology (not DS) participated. They completed an everyday memory...
In visual statistical learning, one can extract the statistical regularities of target locations in an incidental manner. The current study examined the impact of salient perceptual cues on one type of visual statistical learning: probability cueing effects. In a visual search task, the target appeared more often in one quadrant (i.e., rich) than t...
Background
Wayfinding refers to traveling from place to place in the environment. Despite some research headway, it remains unclear whether individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show strengths, weaknesses, or similarities in wayfinding compared with ability-matched typically developing (TD) controls.
Method
The current study tested 24 in...
Introduction
Previous studies have found that patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) showed impairments in certain aspects of spatial orientation. The current study aimed to systematically investigate whether these impairments extend to wayfinding abilities in patients with PD. Wayfinding refers to the ability to navigate to an unseen location in t...
People with Down syndrome often exhibit deficiencies in wayfinding activities, particularly route learning (e.g., Courbois et al., 2013; Davis et al., 2014; Farran et al., 2015). Evidence concerning more sophisticated survey learning has been sparse. In the research reported here, two experiments are reported that evaluated survey learning of youth...
Long-term memory (LTM) can be acquired without conscious awareness resulting in implicit memory. However, lack of awareness does not necessarily mean fully independent of working memory (WM). In the current study, 6-8-year-olds, 11-13-year-olds, and young adults completed two implicit memory tasks while undertaking either a concurrent visual or a c...
Recent research has suggested that young children may have primitive knowledge of ratio and proportions. However, it is unclear how precisely young children represent ratio magnitudes and how well they apply their ratio knowledge across different contexts. The current study examined 4- to 6-year-olds’ reasoning of ratio magnitudes. In the baseline...
When navigating in a new environment, it is typical for people to resort to external guidance such as Global Positioning System (GPS), or people. However, in the real world, even though navigators have learned the route, they may still prefer to travel with external guidance. We explored how the availability of feedback and the source of external g...
When interacting with the environment, one can encode spatial information via egocentric or allocentric perspectives. Allocentric processing can include both landmark and geometric information. The current study examined egocentric response-focused, allocentric landmark-focused, and allocentric metric-focused processing strategies in large-scale sp...
There have been mixed results in studies investigating proportional reasoning in young children. The current study aimed to examine whether providing visual scaling cues and structuring the reasoning process can improve proportional reasoning in 5- to 6-year-old children. In a series of computerized tasks, children compared the sweetness of 2 mixtu...
Wayfinding requires monitoring movements in the environment, in addition to identifying stable landmarks. The current study investigated how moving entities impact wayfinding. Experiment 1 evaluated the effects of moving entities that were presented during the acquisition but not during retrieval. Experiment 2 examined the effect of presenting movi...
Objects in the environment have both location and identity properties. However, it is unclear how these independent properties are processed and combined in the implicit domain. The current study investigated the development of the implicit memory of object locations and object identities, both independently and combined, and the relation between i...
Four experiments are reported in which 60 younger children (7–8 years old), 60 older children (10–11 years old), and 60 young adults (18–25 years old) performed a conjunctive visual search task (15 per group in each experiment). The number of distractors of each feature type was unbalanced across displays to evaluate participants’ ability to restri...
Bem (1974) reconceptualized masculinity and femininity as independent and orthogonal constructs that both men and women possess to varying degrees. This perspective was used as a starting point to investigate whether the contributions of gender-typed characteristics can help to account for commonly observed gender differences in wayfinding (the abi...
Background Navigating the environment, or wayfinding, is integral to independent living. Laboratory studies have consistently indicated an impairment in wayfinding in people with Down syndrome (DS). However, very little is known regarding their real-life wayfinding abilities.
Method Eighty-six parents of children with DS completed an online survey...
Abstract A varied-target search task was used to evaluate the response cost of previous distracters becoming current targets in repeated visual search. We compared the relative contributions of distracter identity and location to producing response cost. During an exposure phase half of the items were possible targets in each repeated display and t...
Contextual cueing effects of 6–8-year-old children, 10–12-year-old-children, and college students were compared under conditions in which some of the distracters in the search displays predicted the location of the target and other distracters did not. More specifically, the percent of distracters that predicted the location of the target varied ac...
Contextual cueing reflects a memory-based attentional guidance process that develops through repeated exposure to displays in which a target location has been consistently paired with a specific context. In two experiments, we compared 20 younger children's (6-7years old), 20 older children's (9-10years old), and 20 young adults' (18-21years old) a...