Publications
The material on this page is posted to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. PDFs of articles are not provided to ensure that copyright is not violated. If you have trouble accessing any of the listed papers, please feel free to email Dr. Lourenco directly for help obtaining a copy.
The impacts of anxiety and motivation on spatial performance: Implications for gender differences in mental rotation and navigation
Lourenco, S. F., & Liu, Y. (2023). The impacts of anxiety and motivation on spatial performance: Implications for gender differences in mental rotation and navigation. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
ABSTRACT: Despite extensive research on gender differences in spatial cognition, the potential roles of affective and situational factors in accounting for these differences remain relatively understudied. Here, we discuss the impacts of spatial anxiety and motivation in mental rotation and navigation tasks, particularly their roles in explaining the gender performance gaps. We highlight the distinction between approach and avoidance motivation, as well as interactions between anxiety and motivation. Attention, working memory, and response strategy are discussed as mechanisms by which anxiety and motivation may affect performance on spatial tasks. Implications for a broader approach that also considers other psychological variables, such as confidence, are discussed.
A theory of perceptual number encoding
Lourenco, S. F. & Aulet, L. S. (in press). A theory of perceptual number encoding. Psychological Review.
ABSTRACT: There has long been interest in how the mind represents numerical magnitude, particularly in the absence of symbols. For humans and nonhuman animals, number represents a core dimension of perceptual experience by which objects in the physical world are delineated. The physical world is also well characterized by other dimensions, many of which covary with number. Yet the general consensus is that number is perceived independently of other magnitudes that co-occur with it. Here we present evidence against the independence of number perception. In particular, we use evidence from neuroimaging, computational modeling, visual illusions, and psychophysics to introduce a novel theory of visual number encoding, wherein non-numerical magnitude information such as cumulative surface area is encoded along with number and sustained throughout visual perception. Moreover, we propose that the experience of number per se reflects the read-out of a multidimensional (ie, integral) representation vis-à-vis selective attention, not the independent encoding of number.
Liu, Y., Ayzenberg, V., & Lourenco, S. F. (2023). Object geometry serves humans' intuitive physics of stability. PsyArXiv.
ABSTRACT: How do humans judge physical stability? A prevalent account emphasizes the mental simulation of physical events implemented by an intuitive physics engine in the mind. Here we test the extent to which the perceptual features of object geometry are sufficient for supporting judgments of falling direction. In all experiments, adults and children judged the falling direction of a tilted object and, across experiments, objects differed in the geometric features (i.e., geometric centroid, object height, base size and/or aspect ratio) relevant to the judgment. Participants’ performance was compared to computational models trained on geometric features, as well as a deep convolutional neural network (ResNet-50), none of which incorporated mental simulation. Adult and child participants’ performance was well fit by models of object geometry, particularly the geometric centroid. ResNet50 also provided a good account of human performance. Altogether, our findings suggest that object geometry may be sufficient for judging the falling direction of tilted objects, independent of mental simulation.
Lab Publications
2023
Liu, Y., Ayzenberg, V., & Lourenco, S. F. (2023). Object geometry serves humans' intuitive physics of stability. PsyArXiv.
Thieu, M. K., Ayzenberg, V., Lourenco, S. F., & Kragel, P. K. (2023). Visual looming is a primitive for human emotion. BioRxiv.
Liu, Y., & Lourenco, S. F. (2023). Trial history influences the malleability of gender differences in children's mental rotation performance. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45, 45.
Aulet, L. S., & Lourenco, S. F. (2023). No intrinsic number bias: evaluating the role of perceptual discriminability in magnitude categorization. Developmental Science, 26, e13305.
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2013
2012
Vasilyeva, M., & Lourenco, S. F. (2012). Development of spatial cognition. WIREs Cognitive Science.
2011
2010
2009
2008
Lourenco, S. F., & Levine, S. C. (2008). Early numerical representations and the natural numbers: Is there really a complete disconnect? Behavioral and Behavioral Sciences, 31, 660. [commentary]
2007
2006
2005
2003