title: Reorientation and landmark-guided search by young children: evidence for two systems.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. lee@wjh.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Sang Ah
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Shusterman
authors.forename: Elizabeth S
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Spelke
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014796:Visual Perception