Collaborative Research: Development of Spatial Coding

小行星9222073 这项研究关注的是儿童记忆物体位置的能力。 记住事物在世界上的位置具有非常明显的适应性重要性。 然而，有点令人惊讶的是，皮亚杰的著名著作声称，9岁或10岁以下的儿童只记住某个物体是否接触或靠近地标的位置，而不是距离。 这种对空间发展的描述指导了后来对地理、地图阅读和几何等领域课程的许多思考。 然而，最近使用新技术的研究表明，早在16个月大的时候，儿童就可以准确地编码距离。 此外，他们所犯的小错误显示出一种系统性偏差模式，这表明，与成年人一样，这个年龄段的儿童在空间类别方面对位置进行编码，并且在更细粒度的水平上，当他们搜索物体时，将这两个水平结合起来。 这个过程可以被称为分层编码。 第一组新的实验将通过排除其他几个关于儿童偏见模式的解释来检验儿童从很早就使用分层编码的假设。 第二条工作线将使用一种新的范式来研究早在4个月时的距离编码。 这个年龄段的婴儿还不能爬行，而且刚刚开始伸手，所以在这个时候发现距离编码意味着爬行和伸手对这种编码并不重要（正如皮亚杰和其他人所建议的那样）。 第三组实验将建立层次编码中使用的类别的性质，特别是，更大的空间的细分的概率和程度是否随着年龄的增长而增加。 第四行的工作将集中在空间判断的偏见，旨在测试的假设，这些发生时，空间被细分。 总之，这项工作应该建立一个新的理论帐户的空间发展。 ***

9222073 HUTTENLOCHER This research concerns children's ability to remember the locations of objects. Remembering where things are in the world has very clear adaptive importance. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, the well- known work of Piaget claimed that children younger than 9 or 10 years remember location only in terms of whether something touches or is close to a landmark, but not in terms of distance. This description of spatial development has guided much subsequent thinking about curricula in areas such as geography, map-reading, and geometry. However, recent work using new techniques suggests that, by as early as 16 months, children can indeed encode distance accurately. In addition, the small errors they do make show a pattern of systematic bias that suggests that, like adults, children of this age encode location in terms of spatial categories, as well as at a more fine-grained level, combining the two levels when they search for objects. This process can be called hierarchical coding. The first group of new experiments will test the hypothesis that children use hierarchical coding from a very early time, by excluding several other accounts of their bias patterns. The second line of work will use a new paradigm to investigate coding of distance as early as 4 months. Infants of this age cannot crawl, and are just beginning to reach, so finding distance coding at this time would suggest that crawling and reaching are not vital to such coding (as Piaget and others have suggested). A third set of experiments will establish the nature of the categories used in hierarchical coding, in particular, whether the probability and extent of subdivision of larger spaces increases with age. The fourth line of work will focus on biases in spatial judgment, aimed at testing the hypothesis that these occur when spaces are subdivided. Taken together, the work should establish a new theoretical account of spatial development. ***