Collaborative Research: Development of Spatial Coding

[221855]纽科姆：这项研究涉及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，皮亚杰的著名研究声称，9岁或10岁以下的儿童只根据某物是否靠近地标来记住位置，而不是根据距离来记住位置。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，孩子们确实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见的模式，这表明，像成年人一样，这个年龄段的孩子在空间类别方面对位置进行编码，同时在更细粒度的层面上，在寻找物体时将这两种层面结合起来。这个过程可以称为分层编码。第一组新实验将通过排除其他几种对他们偏见模式的解释，来验证儿童从很小的时候就开始使用分层编码的假设。第二项工作将使用一个新的范式来研究距离编码，最早将在4个月后进行。这个年龄段的婴儿不会爬行，而且刚刚开始伸手，所以在这个时候发现距离编码表明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）。第三组实验将确定层次编码中使用的类别的性质，特别是大空间细分的概率和范围是否随着年龄的增长而增加。第四项工作将侧重于空间判断的偏差，旨在测试当空间被细分时这些偏差会发生的假设。总的来说，这项工作应该建立一个新的空间发展理论。＊＊＊

9221855 NEWCOMBE 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. ***