The effect of simultaneous versus serial responding on children's ability to coordinate two dimensions

Abstract

Previous research by Lidster and Bremner (1999) on young children's ability to coordinate two dimensions has shown that performance on construction tasks (in which children have to give the correct coordinates for a point in space that is already known) is superior to performance on interpretation tasks (in which children are given a pair of coordinates and have to locate the correct point in space on the basis of these). The present study investigates the suggestion made by Lidster and Bremner that construction tasks may be easier due to the possibility that they can be solved by attending to only one dimension at a time. In this experiment 84 children between the ages of 3 and 6 years were given 16 trials of a construction task, which they were either asked to do by moving two pointers simultaneously or by moving the pointers sequentially. Overall there was no main effect of condition. However, some trials were affected by condition. These results are discussed in relation to Lidster and Bremner's suggestions and Huttenlocher, Newcombe, and Sandberg's (1994) claims regarding the development of spatial understanding.