Collaborative Research: The Development of Spatial Coding

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Human beings, like all organisms that move in the world, must rememberthe location of objects and goals in order to live successfully. Unlikeother organisms, human beings can learn about locations bothsymbolically and through direct experience. The goal of this researchprogram is to understand the development of spatial competence.Recent work has shown that many spatial skills arise earlier indevelopment than had hitherto been supposed. However, early success mayreflect the use of simple processes, different from mature coding,rather than innate specification of spatial competence. Three sets ofstudies will be carried out to address this general issue. In one lineof work, the focus is on the nature of infant location coding asinferred from their looking times to events. In a second line of work,the aim is to evaluate a recent claim that children show evidence of aninnately-specified "geometric module" in their searches for hiddenobjects. The third line of work will examine how children use simplemaps to find hidden objects.Finding evidence for developmental transformations in spatialdevelopment as well as for strong initial starting points is importanttheoretically, as it provides support for a position in which biologicalspecification and environmental interaction interact to producedevelopment. In practical terms, support for such a position wouldindicate that certain environmental experiences may be necessary fornormal development, and could even be manipulated to allow optimaldevelopment.