Reorientation In Children Research Articles

The developmental trajectories of children's reorientation to global and local properties of environmental geometry.

The way in which organisms represent the shape of their environments during navigation has been debated in cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology. While there is evidence that adult humans encode the entire boundary shape of an environment (a global-shape representation), there are also data demonstrating that organisms reorient using only segments of the boundary that signal a goal location (a local-shape representation). Developmental studies offer unique insights into this debate; however, most studies have used designs that cannot dissociate the type of boundary-shape representation that children use to guide reorientation. Thus, we examined the developmental trajectories of children's reorientation according to local and global boundary shape. Participants aged 6-12 years were trained to find a goal hidden in one corner of a virtual arena, after which they were required to reorient in a novel test arena. From 10.5 years, children performed above chance when the test arena permitted reorientation based only on local-shape (Experiment 2), or only global-shape (Experiment 3) information. Moreover, when these responses were placed into conflict, older children reoriented with respect to global-shape information (Experiment 4). These age-related findings were not due to older children being better able to reorient in virtual environments per se: when trained and tested within the same environment (Experiment 1), children performed above chance from 6 years. Together, our results suggest (a) the ability to reorient on the basis of global- and local-shape representations develops in parallel, and (b) shape-based information is weighted to determine which representation informs reorientation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A new biomarker to examine the role of hippocampal function in the development of spatial reorientation in children: a review.

Spatial navigation is an adaptive skill that involves determining the route to a particular goal or location, and then traveling that path. A major component of spatial navigation is spatial reorientation, or the ability to reestablish a sense of direction after being disoriented. The hippocampus is known to be critical for navigating, and has more recently been implicated in reorienting in adults, but relatively little is known about the development of the hippocampus in relation to these large-scale spatial abilities in children. It has been established that, compared to school-aged children, preschool children tend to perform poorly on certain spatial reorientation tasks, suggesting that their hippocampi may not be mature enough to process the demands of such a task. Currently, common techniques used to examine underlying brain activity, such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are not suitable for examining hippocampal development in young children. In the present paper, we argue instead for the use of eyeblink conditioning (EBC), a relatively under-utilized, inexpensive, and safe method that is easy to implement in developing populations. In addition, EBC has a well defined neural circuitry, which includes the hippocampus, making it an ideal tool to indirectly measure hippocampal functioning in young children. In this review, we will evaluate the literature on EBC and its relation to hippocampal development, and discuss the possibility of using EBC as an objective measure of associative learning in relation to large-scale spatial skills. We support the use of EBC as a way to indirectly access hippocampal function in typical and atypical populations in order to characterize the neural substrates associated with the development of spatial reorientation abilities in early childhood. As such, EBC is a potential, simple biomarker for success in tasks that require the hippocampus, including spatial reorientation.

The Influence of Cue Reliability and Cue Representation on Spatial Reorientation in Young Children

Previous studies of children's reorientation have focused on cue representation (e.g., whether cues are geometric) as a predictor of performance but have not addressed cue reliability (the regularity of the relation between a given cue and an outcome) as a predictor of performance. Here we address both factors within the same series of experiments. We show that for 18- to 30-month-olds, high cue reliability is a dominant factor positively affecting reorientation behavior. Under conditions of high cue reliability, children use both scalar and nonscalar cues for successful reorientation. By contrast, under conditions of low cue reliability, children successfully use scalar cues but not nonscalar cues, suggesting that mapping of left–right visual features onto a viewer-centric sense of left and right is facilitated when features themselves are ordered. More generally, we suggest that cue-driven spatial reorientation is best understood as part of a broader system capable of flexibly linking stimuli and responses.

Young children reorient by computing layout geometry, not by matching images of the environment

Disoriented animals from ants to humans reorient in accord with the shape of the surrounding surface layout: a behavioral pattern long taken as evidence for sensitivity to layout geometry. Recent computational models suggest, however, that the reorientation process may not depend on geometrical analyses but instead on the matching of brightness contours in 2D images of the environment. Here we test this suggestion by investigating young children's reorientation in enclosed environments. Children reoriented by extremely subtle geometric properties of the 3D layout: bumps and ridges that protruded only slightly off the floor, producing edges with low contrast. Moreover, children failed to reorient by prominent brightness contours in continuous layouts with no distinctive 3D structure. The findings provide evidence that geometric layout representations support children's reorientation.

A modular geometric mechanism for reorientation in children

Although disoriented young children reorient themselves in relation to the shape of the surrounding surface layout, cognitive accounts of this ability vary. The present paper tests three theories of reorientation: a snapshot theory based on visual image-matching computations, an adaptive combination theory proposing that diverse environmental cues to orientation are weighted according to their experienced reliability, and a modular theory centering on encapsulated computations of the shape of the extended surface layout. Seven experiments test these theories by manipulating four properties of objects placed within a cylindrical space: their size, motion, dimensionality, and distance from the space’s borders. Their findings support the modular theory and suggest that disoriented search behavior centers on two processes: a reorientation process based on the geometry of the 3D surface layout, and a beacon-guidance process based on the local features of objects and surface markings.

Use of geometry for spatial reorientation in children applies only to symmetric spaces

Proponents of the geometric module hypothesis argue that following disorientation, many species reorient by use of macro-environment geometry. It is suggested that attention to the surface layout geometry of natural terrain features may have been selected for over evolutionary time due to the enduring and unambiguous location information it provides. Paradoxically, however, tests of the hypothesis have been exclusively conducted in symmetric (hence 'unnatural' and geometrically ambiguous) environments. The present series of studies examines reorientation by 18-month-3-year-old children in a rectangular versus irregular quadrilateral enclosure (Study 1), a rectangular versus irregular quadrilateral array (Study 2) and an isosceles versus irregular triangular array (Study 3). Children were successful in symmetric but not asymmetric environments, casting doubt on the functional argument for an empirical basis of the geometric module hypothesis.

Limitation of the Geometric Module: Evidence from Children's Reorientation Behavior in a Trapezoidal Room

Humans and animals are able to orient themselves to an environment. Previous studies have demonstrated that young children's reorientation behaviors are mainly guided by the geometric information of their environment. Children often reorient themselves according to the shape of the testing room and not in accordance with the room's non-geometric properties. While previous studies typically used rectangular testing rooms that provided unique geometric information, we used a trapezoidal testing room that allowed us to explore the manner in which children use geometric information, including the angle of the corners as well as the dimensions of the walls. In a preliminary experiment, a rectangular testing room (1.9m×1.2m×1.2m) was used. In Experiment 1 (where the participants were children) and Experiment 2 ( where the participants were adults), one of the walls of rectangular room was shortened from 1.2m to 1m to form a trapezoidal testing room. In Experiment 3, the lengths of the two hemlines of the trapezium were altered to 0.9m and 1.5m. Participants included children who were 24 years old and adults (N=20) who were university students. In each experiment, the participants' reorientation abilities were tested through a procedure adapted from Hermer and Spelke (1994, 1996). First, the participants were allowed to observe the environment. Thereafter, they watched the experimenter hide an object in one of the landmark boxes positioned in the four corners of the room. Following one of the two experimental manipulations, the participants were required to retrieve the object. In oriented search trials, the participants retrieved the object after turning 360 degrees in one spot four times, with their eyes open. This served as a control condition that probed whether the participants remembered where the experimenter had hidden the object. In disoriented search trials, the participants retrieved the object after turning 360 degrees, four to six times in one spot, with their eyes closed; this condition was found to induce a state of disorientation in children of this age (Hermer and Spelke, 1996). The results of the preliminary experiment indicated that children search geometrically appropriate locations more often than geometrically inappropriate locations, but did not search proximate locations more often than they do distant locations. In particular, the proportion of the search at the correct corner and at the geometrically equivalent opposite corner (in diagonal direction) did not differ. This result was consistent with the findings of previous studies. When children were tested in a trapezoidal room, they still went to the correct corner or the opposite corner. The video recording revealed that when children faced the two hemlines of the trapezium, they frequently and directly went to the correct corner or the opposite corner. However, when they faced the two lateral walls of the trapezium, they infrequently and indirectly went to the correct corner or the opposite corner. The present study provides converging evidence suggesting that children do not rely solely on geometric information about the dimensions of the walls of their environment. Further, their reorientation behaviors can be affected by egocentric information. It is most probable that children use information of the principal axe of the trapezoidal testing room in the task of reorientation.

Children's use of geometry for reorientation

Research on navigation has shown that humans and laboratory animals recover their sense of orientation primarily by detecting geometric properties of large-scale surface layouts (e.g. room shape), but the reasons for the primacy of layout geometry have not been clarified. In four experiments, we tested whether 4-year-old children reorient by the geometry of extended wall-like surfaces because such surfaces are large and perceived as stable, because they serve as barriers to vision or to locomotion, or because they form a single, connected geometric figure. Disoriented children successfully reoriented by the shape of an arena formed by surfaces that were short enough to see and step over. In contrast, children failed to reorient by the shape of an arena defined by large and stable columns or by connected lines on the floor. We conclude that preschool children's reorientation is not guided by the functional relevance of the immediate environmental properties, but rather by a specific sensitivity to the geometric properties of the extended three-dimensional surface layout.

Distraction and reorientation in children: a behavioral and ERP study.

In the context of distraction, involuntary orienting to task-irrelevant deviations and the following reorienting to task-relevant stimulus information were studied in children aged 5-6 years. In an auditory distraction paradigm, reaction times were prolonged by 51 ms in trials including a task-irrelevant stimulus deviancy. Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a mismatch response (MMR) at 252 ms and a reorienting negativity (RON) 476 ms post-stimulus in response to deviating sounds. These behavioral and ERP effects resemble those reported for adults. We conclude that kindergarten children are prone to distraction, although they can quite effectively but not fully shield working memory operations from perturbating distracting information, and can recover from distraction in a similar way to adults.

Modularity and development: the case of spatial reorientation

In a series of experiments, young children who were disoriented in a novel environment reoriented themselves in accord with the large-scale shape of the environment but not in accord with nongeometric properties of the environment such as the color of a wall, the patterning on a box, or the categorical identity of an object. Because children's failure to reorient by nongeometric information cannot be attributed to limits on their ability to detect, remember, or use that information for other purposes, this failure suggests that children's reorientation, at least in relatively novel environments, depends on a mechanism that is informationally encapsulated and task-specific: two hallmarks of modular cognitive processes. Parallel studies with rats suggest that children share this mechanism with at least some adult nonhuman mammals. In contrast, our own studies of human adults, who readily solved our tasks by conjoining nongeometric and geometric information, indicated that the most striking limitations of this mechanism are overcome during human development. These findings support broader proposals concerning the domain specificity of humans' core cognitive abilities, the conservation of cognitive abilities across related species and over the course of human development, and the developmental processes by which core abilities are extended to permit more flexible, uniquely human kinds of problem solving.