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".

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

“…In contrast, the flat graphs of the 4-year-olds suggest that they either did not apply mental rotation or tried but failed to do so. The finding that the majority of 4-year-olds performed near chance level in this mental rotation task is consistent with previous reports by Estes (1998) that only a quarter of 4-year-olds reached a rotator criterion based on a significant linear trend in response times. Furthermore, Estes found that at a mean age of 56 and 66 months, children responded correctly on 60 and 74 % of the trials, respectively.…”

“…Linearly increasing response patterns are generally accepted as being indicative of mental rotation and have been shown to be strongly associated with reports of the subjective experience of using mental rotation strategies in adults (e.g., Shepard and Cooper 1982) and in 4-to 6-yearold children (Estes 1998). Thus, the linearly increasing response time and error patterns of the group of 5-year-olds suggest that they used a mental rotation strategy, in general making more errors and taking longer amounts of time to rotate the stimuli at greater degrees of rotation.…”

“…Linn and Petersen's meta-analysis did not include children younger than 10 years of age, and three of the four studies listed by Voyer et al with children below the age of 10 found no significant effects of sex on mental rotation (Caldwell and Hall 1970;Jahoda 1979;Kaess 1971). Among more recent studies with young children aged 4 years and older that were not covered by these meta-analyses, some found no sex differences (Estes 1998;Frick et al 2009a;Kosslyn et al 1990;Platt and Cohen 1981), whereas others found higher error rates in boys (Krüger and Krist 2009), or sex differences in older but not in younger children (i.e., younger than 4.5 years of age, Levine et al 1999).…”

“…In particular, research using looking time paradigms has demonstrated a sensitivity to correspondences between rotated figures in infants as young as 4-6 months (Hespos and Rochat 1997;Möhring and Frick (in press); Moore and Johnson 2008;Quinn and Liben 2008;Rochat and Hespos 1996), but studies using paradigms more similar to the ones used with adult participants have found that children are only able to perform mental rotations at the age of 4-5 years and then at a slower speed than adults (e.g., Kosslyn Margolis et al 1990;Marmor 1975Marmor , 1977. In fact, a follow-up study that employed the same procedure as Marmor with different stimuli found even later success: 4-to 6-year-olds performed near chance level (Dean and Harvey 1979), and analyses of individual children's response time patterns (Estes 1998) suggested that only a small proportion of 4-year-olds appeared to apply a mental rotation strategy. These findings indicate that there are important individual differences in mental rotation abilities in preschoolers.…”

“…In the present study, we tested children between 3 and 5 years, at an age range that covered the lower margin of previous studies (i.e., 4-year-olds: Estes, 1998;Kosslyn et al 1990;Marmor 1977;Platt and Cohen 1981), and also included children who were half a year younger. In consideration of the very young age of our participants, simplified two-dimensional Shepard-Metzler-like figures were presented, which consisted of two orthogonal segments of differing lengths, rather than the original four segments (Shepard and Metzler 1971).…”