SCALE RELATIONS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPATIAL COGNITION

描述：大小和规模的问题会影响人类的交流、思维、 并在许多方面进行调查。例如，在科学方面，变化 规模和规模的概念对发展产生了巨大的影响 许多核心思想的缩影。例如，在生物学中，基因的发明 显微镜使人们可以获得不同规模的生物功能。这 发现从根本上改变了人们对生命和生殖的观念。这个 比例关系概念的变化也可能影响 孩子们以类似的方式思考。因此，中国的发展 儿童对尺度关系的理解是一个实质性的问题 重要性。拟议研究的长期目标是开发一种 讲述幼儿如何理解和使用比例关系。 这项拟议的研究包括一系列心理学实验， 被设计成对小孩子有意义。该提案涉及两个问题 互惠的目标。第一个具体目标是开发和测试 儿童对量表的理解和使用的发展状况 在特定领域的关系，空间认知。空间任务提供了一种 考察儿童尺度概念的理想境界 关系。例如，理解和使用比例信息是 对空间认知的许多方面至关重要，包括 视角的协调以及地图和比例模型的使用。在……里面 此外，空间任务对年幼的孩子来说是激励和有趣的 并经常被用来研究许多 重要的认知技能。第二个具体目标是使用儿童的 在扩展任务中的表现作为研究发展的窗口 儿童对空间信息的心理表征。扩展任务可以 要求儿童在心理上代表并系统地转换一组 能够做到这一点是一个重要的里程碑 在空间认知的发展过程中。这项提案引入了一个 关注地图和比例模型如何发挥作用的理论视角 儿童(和成人)获取关于物体之间关系的信息 在太空中。此外，研究结果可能与理解 神经性疾病，如视觉疏忽和空间失认 影响空间信息的处理。总而言之，拟议的 研究将提供关于一个重要但相对 未探索的问题--儿童规模概念的发展 关系。与此同时，这项研究将为一部经典作品带来新的曙光 认知发展中的问题：儿童心理发展 空间信息的表示。

DESCRIPTION: Issues of size and scale affect human communication, thought, and inquiry in many ways. For example, in the sciences, changes in conceptions of size and scale have had dramatic effects on the development of many core ideas. In biology, for example, the invention of the microscope made accessible a different scale of biological function. This discovery altered fundamentally conceptions of life and reproduction. The effects of changes in conceptions of scale relations might also affect children's thinking in analogous ways. Consequently, the development of children's comprehension of scale relations is an issue of substantial importance. The long term goal of the proposed research is to develop an account of how young children come to understand and use scale relations. The proposed research consists of a set of psychological experiments that are designed to be meaningful to young children. The proposal addresses two reciprocal aims. The first specific aim is to develop and test elements of an account of the development of children's understanding and use of scale relations in a specific domain, spatial cognition. Spatial tasks provide an ideal domain in which to investigate children's conception of scale relations. For example, understanding and using scale information is of critical importance to many aspects of spatial cognition, including the coordination of perspectives and the use of maps and scale models. In addition, spatial tasks are motivating and interesting for young children and have often been used to investigate the early development of many important cognitive skills. The second specific aim is to use children's performance in the scaling tasks as a window for studying the development of children's mental representations of spatial information. Scaling tasks may require that children mentally represent and systematically transform a set of spatial relations, and the ability to do this is an important milestone in the development of spatial cognition. This proposal introduces a theoretical perspective that focuses on how maps and scale models may help children (and adults) acquire information about the relations among objects in space. In addition, the results may be relevant to understanding neurological disorders, such as visual neglect and spatial agnosia, that affect the processing of spatial information. Taken together, the proposed studies would provide new information about an important, but relatively unexplored issue, the development of children's conception of scale relations. At the same time, the research would shed new light on a classic issue in cognitive development: the development of children's mental representations of spatial information.