Spatial Language and Children’s Spatial Landmark Use

Abstract

We examined how spatial language affected search behavior in a landmark spatial search task. In Experiment 1, two- to six-year-old children were trained to find a toy in the center of a square array of four identical landmarks. Children heard one of three spatial language cues once during the initial training trial (“here,” “in the middle,” “next to this one”). After search performance reached criterion, children received a probe test trial in which the landmark array was expanded. In Experiment 2, two- to four-year-old children participated in the search task and also completed a language comprehension task. Results revealed that children’s spatial language comprehension scores and spatial language cues heard during training trials were related to children’s performance in the search task.

Coding Locations Relative to One or Many Landmarks in Childhood

“…Another crucial way to subdivide allocentric reasoning is by the richness of the representation, remembering a target location relative to one landmark versus many. Here we present new data and new models to further probe a key question from previous work [21, 26–30]: do children use multiple landmarks to encode a target location allocentrically? How does this tend to change across development?…”

“…Previous developmental studies have asked which kinds of cues allow access to allocentric recall at different points in development (e.g. coincident cues [14], beacons [15], proximal landmarks [16, 17], distal landmarks [15, 16], salient landmarks [18], unstable landmarks [19], language [20, 21], transparent boundaries [22], and geometric relations [14, 23–25]). Another crucial way to subdivide allocentric reasoning is by the richness of the representation, remembering a target location relative to one landmark versus many.…”

“…Previous work has largely concluded that during allocentric recall, young children remember locations as a set of allocentric relations to multiple landmarks, rather than just a single landmark [21, 26, 28–30]. Biology researchers working with non-human species pioneered the expansion paradigm to test this issue [31].…”

“…Variations on this paradigm have been applied to human children as well, from approximately 2 to 8 years old. Most reports conclude that children encode the locations as ‘in the middle’ [21, 26, 28–30] (while another found a pattern of results that was not particularly consistent with any hypothesized strategy [27]). This fits into a broader theoretical context in which young children’s behaviour indicates they use multiple sources of information in concert to make decisions (e.g.…”

Understanding Landmark Use In Children - Can Landmark Use Be Generalized Across Two Tasks?

“…The combination of geometric and landmark cues is easy for adults but not for children. The addition of spatial language seemed to aid in the ability for adults to perform successfully on navigation tasks (Ankowski, Thom, Sandhofer, & Blaisdell, 2012). Young children have not fully developed their use of spatial language so they must rely specifically on the combination of cues.…”