Using a touch screen paradigm to assess the development of mental rotation between 3½ and 5½ years of age

Frick, Andrea; Ferrara, Katrina; Newcombe, Nora S.

doi:10.1007/s10339-012-0534-0

Cited by 89 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…These results are in accordance with research on mental rotation, which revealed linear effects of rotation angle on 4-to 5-year-olds' response times (Marmor, 1975(Marmor, , 1977. However, whereas some mental rotation studies showed that less than half of the 4-year-olds can successfully rotate objects and performance increases considerably in preschool years (Estes, 1998;Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013;Frick, Hansen, & Newcombe, 2013), no differences between 4-and 5-year-olds' response times were observed in the present scaling task. Thus, it is possible that mental rotation tasks pose higher cognitive demands, as they typically require children to differentiate mirror images, which may be especially challenging for young participants.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Zooming in on spatial scaling: Preschool children and adults use mental transformations to scale spaces.

Möhring¹,

Newcombe²,

Frick³

2014

Developmental Psychology

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Spatial scaling is an important prerequisite for many spatial tasks and involves an understanding of how distances in different-sized spaces correspond. Previous studies have found evidence for such an understanding in preschoolers; however, the mental processes involved remain unclear. The present study investigated whether children and adults use mental transformations to scale distances in space. Adults and 4-and 5-year-old children (N = 60) were asked to use maps to locate target objects in a larger referent space on a touchscreen. The size of the referent space was held constant, but the sizes of the maps were varied systematically, resulting in seven scaling factors. A linear increase in response times and errors with increasing scaling factor suggested that participants of every age group mentally transformed the size of the map to compare it to the referent, providing evidence for an analog imagery strategy in children's and adults' spatial scaling. Spatial scaling is fundamental to many spatial tasks that require an understanding of how distances in different-sized spaces are related. The ability to map distances from one space to another is involved in many daily activities, such as interpreting navigation aids or imagining the height of a building by looking at its blueprint. Around the age of 3 years, children are able to establish symbolic correspondence between a model and its referent (DeLoache, 1987), but successful mapping between spatial representations also requires an understanding of geometric correspondence (Downs, 1985;Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 2000).A crucial precondition for establishing geometric correspondence is the ability to encode distances in a metric manner. There is evidence that metric coding is present early in life. Looking time studies revealed that 5-month-old infants are sensitive to changes in metric distances (Newcombe, Huttenlocher, & Learmonth, 1999;Newcombe, Sluzenski & Huttenlocher, 2005), and toddlers encode distance metrically in a hide-and-seek game (Huttenlocher, Newcombe, & Sandberg, 1994). Furthermore, magnitude coding is used early in life, as evidenced by infants' discrimination of space, time, number, and speed (Brannon, Lutz, & Cordes, 2006;Brannon, Suanda, & Libertus, 2007;Möhring, Libertus, & Bertin, 2012;Xu & Spelke, 2000), and recent studies yielded evidence for cross-dimensional transfer, suggesting that magnitude information regarding various dimensions is coded in one representational system (de Hevia & Spelke, 2010;Lourenco & Longo, 2010). It is likely that metric understanding is based on this fundamental comparative system, termed the general magnitude system (Walsh, 2003).A second crucial step in establishing geometric correspondence is to map distances from one space to another, which -for different sized spaces -requires spatial scaling. Running Head: ZOOMING IN ON SPATIAL SCALING 4Previous research has shown that if task demands are low and locations vary on one dimension only, 3-year-olds are able to locate objects in a referent space,...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Zooming in on spatial scaling: Preschool children and adults use mental transformations to scale spaces.

Möhring¹,

Newcombe²,

Frick³

2014

Developmental Psychology

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“…Vygotsky, 1978) to acquiring mental rotation skills and were able to process feedback information, whereas others (and especially 4-year-olds) were not cognitively ready to profit from feedback yet. In line with these results, a recent study (Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013) showed that observational and manual experience improved mental rotation performance of 5-year-olds who were performing above chance, but did not improve the performance of 4-year-olds. Individual differences in cognitive readiness at age 5 also could explain the incongruent results regarding the trainability of mental rotation in previous studies (e.g., Marmor, 1977;Platt & Cohen, 1981).…”

Section: Running Head: Mental Rotation In 3-to 5-year-olds 20mentioning

confidence: 58%

Development of mental rotation in 3- to 5-year-old children

Frick

Hansen

Newcombe

2013

Cognitive Development

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130

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“…As they get older, children may become better at translating observed movements into covertly activated (but not executed) action plans (Wilson, 2002). Indeed, recent research showed that by 5 years of age, both manual and observational experience increased accuracy in a mental rotation task (Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013). In the present experiment, we investigated at which age infants would succeed at a mental rotation task after observational experience only.…”

Section: Mental Object Rotation!and Motor Development In 8-and 10-monmentioning

confidence: 90%

Mental object rotation and motor development in 8- and 10-month-old infants

Frick

Möhring

2013

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Recent evidence indicates that 6-month-old infants' mental rotation of objects profits from prior manual experience, whereas observational experience does not have the same beneficial effect (Möhring, W. & Frick, A., 2013, Child Development). The present study investigated whether older infants, at 8 and 10 months of age, succeed in this task after observational experience only, and whether performance is related to infants' motor development. Using the violation-of-expectation paradigm, infants (N = 40) were presented with an asymmetrical object that was moved straight down behind an occluder. After the occluder was lowered, infants saw either the original object (possible event) or a mirror image of the original object (impossible event) in one of five different orientations (0° to 180°, in steps of 45°). Results indicated that it was not until 10 months of age that infants looked longer at the impossible outcome. Analyses including parent questionnaire data showed that mental rotation performance was related to infants' motor development emphasizing the importance of action experience for early cognitive development.

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Using a touch screen paradigm to assess the development of mental rotation between 3½ and 5½ years of age

Cited by 89 publications

References 38 publications

Zooming in on spatial scaling: Preschool children and adults use mental transformations to scale spaces.

Zooming in on spatial scaling: Preschool children and adults use mental transformations to scale spaces.

Development of mental rotation in 3- to 5-year-old children

Mental object rotation and motor development in 8- and 10-month-old infants

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