An Information-Processing Analysis of Children's Accuracy in Predicting the Appearance of Rotated Stimuli

Abstract

Children's ability to discriminate reflections and rotations of visual stimuli was examined using a kinetic imagery task. It was hypothesized that success would be related to the number and placement of orientation markers on the stimuli, as well as whether or not reflections had to be discriminated from simple rotations. 40 4- and 5-year-old children were directed to imagine how a stimulus would look if rotated to a specified location and asked to indicate the appearance of the reoriented stimulus by selecting the correct option from a number of foils. 48 of the items required only discrimination of a reoriented stimulus. The other 48 also required discrimination of a reflection of the reoriented stimulus. Stimuli differed in the number of orientation cues on the edges of the figures. Results revealed that prediction accuracy was associated with the existence of orientation markers on the stimuli, as well as age, sex, type of discrimination, and several interactions among the variables. Findings were discussed in comparison to a priori predictions based on an analysis of how children might use orientation information when performing mental rotation tasks.

Early sex differences in spatial skill.

“…Results of the present study, together with earlier findings of sex differences in preschoolers on a variety of spatial tasks (Cronin, 1967;Fairweather & Butterworth, 1977;McGuiness & Morley, 1991;Rosser et al, 1984;Siegel & Schadler, 1977;Uttal et al, 1999;Wilson, 1975), indicate that children begin to show sex differences on at least a subset of spatial tasks by the preschool years. These findings should put to rest claims that adolescence marks the onset of sex differences in spatial skill.…”

“…Kindergarten and first-grade boys performed better than girls in discriminating mirror reversals of triangles from identical triangles (Cronin, 1967), a task that may involve mental rotation. Four and 5-year-old boys performed better than girls in discriminating a particular 2-D rotation of a stimulus with salient external features from foils, which included a mirror reversal of the correct choice and other 2-D rotations (Rosser, Ensing, Gilder, & Lane, 1984). Uttal, Gregg, and Chamberlain (1999) found that 5-year-old boys were better at interpreting a map of a space than 5-year-old girls, particularly when the map was rotated with respect to the space it represented.…”

Age and sex differences in children’s spatial search strategies

“…Although a few studies have reported a male advantage in spatial ability in young children, the age at which this sex difference emerges appears to depend on the nature of the spatial ability tested (see Voyer et al, 1995). Specifically, sex differences have been found in preschool children, but these have primarily occurred in tasks that required mental transformations of objects, such as mental rotation (Rosser, Ensing, Gilder, & Lane, 1984), 3-D puzzle tasks (McGuinness & Morley, 1991), and spatial transformation tasks (Levine, Huttenlocher, Taylor, & Langrock, 1999). In other kinds of spatial tasks, sex differences have typically not been seen in preschool children (see, e.g., Uttal, Gregg, Tan, Chamberlin, & Sines, 2001;Vasilyeva & Huttenlocher, 2004).…”

The Effects of Presented Media Types on Spatial Cognition Task Performance in Preschool Children

“…The rotation task tool was designed based on earlier, related tools (Choi & Lee, 2006;Piaget & Inhelder, 1971;Rosser, Ensing, Clider, & Lane, 1984). The rotation task tool consisted of a right-rotation task (90° to right) and a left-rotation task (90° to left).…”