Young Children's Awareness of Their Mental Activity: The Case of Mental Rotation

Abstract

From Piaget's early work to current theory of mind research, young children have been characterized as having little or no awareness of their mental activity. This conclusion was reexamined by assessing children's conscious access to visual imagery. Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were given a mental rotation task in the form of a computer game, but with no instructions to use mental rotation and no other references to mental activity. During the task, participants were asked to explain how they made their judgments. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year-olds were comparable to adults both in their spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year-olds who referred to mental activity to explain their performance had reaction time and error patterns consistent with mental rotation; 4-year-olds who did not refer to mental activity responded randomly. A second study with 5-year-olds produced similar results. This research demonstrates that conscious access to at least 1 type of thinking is present earlier than previously recognized. It also helps to clarify the conditions under which young children will and will not notice and report their mental activity. These findings have implications for competing accounts of children's developing understanding of the mind and for the "imagery debate."

Metacognitive emotion regulation: Children's awareness that changing thoughts and goals can alleviate negative emotions.

“…In fact, in Study 2, metacognitive strategies were the single most frequent type of strategy that children reported. This finding is consistent with work showing that children are aware of and able to describe mental strategies they themselves use by age six (e.g., Estes, 1998), and studies showing that gains in emotion knowledge during middle childhood allow children increasingly to reflect on their emotional states and engage in flexible emotion regulation (e.g., Meerum Terwogt & Olthof, 1989; Stegge & Meerum Terwogt, 2007). …”

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

“…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.…”

Imagery and Perceptual Basis of Matching Tasks in Young Children

“…One of those processes is generation, the ability to generate visual images. Estes (1998) showed it is requisite for the execution of mental rotation that children were aware of the mental activity of turning an object consciously. The third is scanning, i.e., the ease of scanning across patterns in an image.…”

“…Thus, it is proposed that the consciously observed rotating of the image was the necessary cognitive factor in performance (Flavell, 1971;Estes, 1998). Children were placed in a Practice group or No Practice group because practice was anticipated to increase performance on the Flags Test, depending on the imagery of the children.…”

“…It was considered that the awareness of "strategies by turning" (Estes, 1998) promoted better performance because the score of the Practice group was superior to that of the No Practice group. It might be that practice turning chips made children use the operation according to the instruction and restrained other strategies such as "flip."…”