title: The relationship between the perception of axes of symmetry and spatial memory during early childhood.
abstract: Early in development, there is a transition in spatial working memory (SWM). When remembering a location in a homogeneous space (e.g., in a sandbox), young children are biased toward the midline symmetry axis of the space. Over development, a transition occurs that leads to older children being biased away from midline. The dynamic field theory (DFT) explains this transition in biases as being caused by a change in the precision of neural interaction in SWM and improvements in the perception of midline. According to the DFT, young children perceive midline, but there is a quantitative improvement in the perception of midline over development. In the experiment reported here, children and adults needed to determine on which half of a large monitor a target was located. In support of the DFT, even the youngest children performed above chance at most locations, but performance also improved gradually with age.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA.
authors.forename: Margaret R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Ortmann
authors.forename: Anne R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Schutte
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult