Children's representations of another person's spatial perspective: Different strategies for different viewpoints?
The current study investigated development and strategy use of spatial perspective taking (i.e., the ability to represent how an object or array of objects looks from other viewpoints) in children between 8 and 12years of age. We examined this ability with a task requiring children to navigate a route through a model city of wooden blocks from a 90° and 180° rotated perspective. We tested two hypotheses. First, we hypothesized that children's perspective-taking skills increase during this age period and that this process is related to a co-occurring increase in working memory capacity. Results indeed showed clear age effects; accuracy and speed of perspective-taking performance were higher in the older age groups. Positive associations between perspective-taking performance and working memory were observed. Second, we hypothesized that children, like adults, use a mental self-rotation strategy during spatial perspective taking. To confirm this hypothesis, children's performance should be better in the 90° condition than in the 180° condition of the task. Overall, the results did show the reversed pattern; children were less accurate, were slower, and committed more egocentric errors in the 90° condition than in the 180° condition. These findings support an alternative scenario in which children employ different strategies for different rotation angles. We propose that children mentally rotated their egocentric reference frame for 90° rotations; for the 180° rotations, they inverted the left-right and front-back axes without rotating their mental position.
Department of Educational Neuroscience, LEARN! Research Institute for Learning and Education, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Electronic address: k.m.vanderheyden@vu.nl.
Karin M
KM
Vander Heyden
Department of Educational Neuroscience, LEARN! Research Institute for Learning and Education, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Mariette
M
Huizinga
Department of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University, 2333 AK Leiden, The Netherlands; Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Amsterdam, 1018 XA Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Maartje E J
ME
Raijmakers
Department of Educational Neuroscience, LEARN! Research Institute for Learning and Education, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Jelle
J
Jolles
D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D056344:Executive Function; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D012399:Rotation; D013028:Space Perception; D055815:Young Adult
Children; Development; Inverting strategy; Mental self-rotation; Spatial perspective taking; Strategy use