Abstract

The Development of Spatial Cognition During Childhood: Extending Understanding of Perception, Memory, Language, Maps, and Gestures Anne R. Schutte ([email protected]) and Heidi Fleharty ([email protected]) Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska Lincoln, 238 Burnett Hall Lincoln, NE 68588-0308 USA Alycia M. Hund ([email protected]) Department of Psychology, Illinois State University, Campus Box 4620 Normal, IL 61790-4620 USA David H. Uttal ([email protected]) and Megan Sauter ([email protected]) Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Swift Hall 102, 2029 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208-2710 USA Nina Simms ([email protected]), Dedre Gentner ([email protected]), and David H. Uttal ([email protected]) Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Swift Hall 102, 2029 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208-2710 USA Keywords: spatial cognition; cognitive development. children’s perceptual abilities. Specifically, over development children’s ability to perceive the location of axes of symmetry improves quantitatively. Ortmann and Schutte (2010) examined whether there were changes in children’s ability to perceive the location of symmetry axes by having 3- to 6-year-olds and adults determine on which half of a large monitor a smiley face was located. Three- to 6-year-olds were above chance at classifying all but the location closest to midline, and over development there was improvement in the ability to localize the axis. Despite this apparent ability to perceive the symmetry axes, 3-year-olds do not reliably subdivide space in SWM tasks (Huttenlocher et al., 1994; Schutte et al., 2009). Perhaps their perception of midline is too “fuzzy” for them to use it as a reference axis in memory. We conducted a pilot study with 3-year-olds to examine whether perception of the midline symmetry axis was related to memory biases. The DFT predicts that biases toward midline will be reduced for children who are better able to localize midline, and this relationship will depend on the location of the target in memory. That is, for 3-year- olds, errors to targets that are close to midline will not be correlated with the perception of midline, because these targets are strongly biased toward midline. Memory errors to targets farther from midline, however, should be correlated with their perception of midline. The prediction was supported. Children who were better able to determine on which side of midline a target was located were more likely to be biased away from midline in the spatial memory task for all targets except the two closest to midline. These results support the DFT and demonstrate interactions between perception and cognition over development. Symposium Overview Understanding the development of spatial cognition during childhood is important. Paying close attention to development provides a lens through with to explore mechanisms that underlie stability and change in perception, memory, language, and symbolic understanding over time. This symposium, moderated by Alycia Hund, includes four talks highlighting tight links between spatial perception of midline and memory for nearby targets during early childhood explicated through dynamic systems theory, specifying the development of spatial language (especially middle and between) during early childhood by focusing on the role of scaffolding interactions, exploring links between spatial language, maps, and midpoint search strategies during early childhood, and explicating spatial thinking during childhood by integrating maps, words, and gestures. The symposium concludes with a discussion of common themes, including how children perceive, remember, talk about, and gesture about middle and other spatial relations. Spatial Perception and Working Memory Perception and cognition are inextricably intertwined. This interaction is evident in the development of spatial memory. Early in development there is a transition in memory biases. Young children’s spatial working memory (SWM) responses are biased toward the center of a homogenous space, whereas older children and adults subdivide the space along the midline symmetry axis, and their memory responses are biased away from the center of the space. According to Dynamic Field Theory (DFT), a dynamic systems model of spatial cognition, developmental changes in geometric biases in SWM are caused by changes in neural interaction in SWM and the development of Spatial Language Three-year-olds produce the spatial terms in, on, and under, whereas 4-year-old children produce more complex terms such as back and front. Very little is known about