Abstract
Past research has largely ignored children’s ability to conjointly manipulate spatial and temporal information, but there are indications that the capacity to do so may provide important support for reasoning about causal processes. We hypothesised that spatial-temporal thinking is central to children’s ability to identify the invisible mechanisms that tie cause and effect together in continuous casual processes, which are focal in primary school science and crucial to understanding of the natural world. We investigated this in two studies (N = 107, N = 124), employing two methodologies, one shorter, the other more in depth. Further tasks assessed spatial-temporal (flow of liquid, extrapolation of relative speed, distance-time-velocity), spatial (two mental rotation, paper folding), verbal (expressive vocabulary), and nonverbal (block design) ability. Age dependent patterns were detected for both causal and predictor tasks. Two spatial-temporal tasks were unique and central predictors of children’s causal reasoning, especially inference of mechanism. Nonverbal ability predicted the simpler components of causal reasoning. One mental rotation task predicted only young children’s causal thinking. Verbal ability became significant when the sample included children from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Causal reasoning about continuous processes, including inferences of causal mechanism, appears to be within the reach of children from school entry age, but mechanism inference is uncommon. Analytic forms of spatial-temporal capacity seem to be important requirements for children to progress to this rather than merely perceptual forms.
Highlights
They have clear points of connection, children’s spatial and temporal cognition have typically been investigated separately, with limited consideration of how they might combine, as for example in visualising the trajectory of a ball over continuous moments after it has been thrown
Intrinsic skills involve the processing of spatial relations within objects without or with alterations in these, as in mental rotation [15] and paper folding tasks [16]
In order to close this gap in the literature we examine whether a) spatial-temporal ability is distinct from these, and b) spatial ability has any predictive value of its own as far as causal analysis of continuous processes is concerned
Summary
They have clear points of connection, children’s spatial and temporal cognition have typically been investigated separately, with limited consideration of how they might combine, as for example in visualising the trajectory of a ball over continuous moments after it has been thrown (see e.g. [1,2,3,4,5], for work on spatial thinking; and [6,7,8,9], for work on cognition of time). Spatial and spatial-temporal analysis in children’s causal cognition cannot be conceived independent of time, and vice versa. Studies found that it was not a unitary form of thinking; instead there were a number of spatial abilities, such as image generation, storage, retrieval, and transformation [10,11,12,13]. Newcombe and Shipley’s ([14]; see [15]) much-cited theoretical model has distinguished between intrinsic/extrinsic and static/dynamic spatial abilities, as a basis for a classification of spatial tasks. Intrinsic skills involve the processing of spatial relations within objects without (static) or with alterations (dynamic) in these, as in mental rotation [15] and paper folding tasks [16]. In all of these the focus is on spatial configurations; even in dynamic tasks, there is no concern with the temporal dimension, merely with initial and final states
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