Reorientation and landmark-guided search by young children: evidence for two systems.
Disoriented 4-year-old children use a distinctive container to locate a hidden object, but do they reorient by this information? We addressed this question by testing children's search for objects in a circular room containing one distinctive and two identical containers. Children's search patterns provided evidence that the distinctive container served as a direct cue to a hidden object's location, but not as a directional signal guiding reorientation. The findings suggest that disoriented children's search behavior depends on two distinct processes: a modular reorientation process attuned to the geometry of the surface layout and an associative process linking landmarks to specific locations.
Lee
Sang Ah
SA
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. lee@wjh.harvard.edu
Shusterman
Anna
A
Spelke
Elizabeth S
ES
D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014796:Visual Perception