Department of Human and Community Development, University of California, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2012 Jan;111(1):1-21. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2011.06.005.
Three experiments were designed to examine how experience affects young children's spatio-symbolic skills over short time scales. Spatio-symbolic reasoning refers to the ability to interpret and use spatial relations, such as those encountered on a map, to solve symbolic tasks. We designed three tasks in which the featural and spatial correspondences between a map and its referent (a model) were systematically manipulated using a map-model paradigm. We explored how 2.5- to 5-year-olds learn to map spatial arrays when both identical and unique correspondences coexist (Experiment 1), when featural cues are absent (Experiment 2), and when object and location similarities are contradictory, thereby making both featural and spatial mapping strategies distinct (Experiment 3). Although younger children have a stronger tendency to focus on object (or featural) cues, even 2.5-year-olds can appreciate a symbol beyond the level of object similarity. With age, children are increasingly capable of learning to use spatio-relational mapping and of discovering a spatio-symbolic mapping strategy to solve more challenging map use tasks over short time scales.
三个实验旨在考察经验如何在短时间尺度上影响幼儿的空间符号技能。空间符号推理是指解释和使用空间关系（如地图上遇到的关系）以解决符号任务的能力。我们设计了三个任务，在这些任务中，使用地图模型范式系统地操纵地图与其参照（模型）之间的特征和空间对应关系。我们探索了 2.5 至 5 岁的儿童如何在同时存在相同和独特对应关系（实验 1）、不存在特征线索（实验 2）以及物体和位置相似性相互矛盾的情况下学习映射空间数组，从而使特征和空间映射策略都具有明显的区别（实验 3）。尽管年幼的儿童更倾向于关注物体（或特征）线索，但即使是 2.5 岁的儿童也可以超越物体相似性的水平来理解符号。随着年龄的增长，儿童越来越能够学习使用空间关系映射，并发现空间符号映射策略，以便在短时间尺度上解决更具挑战性的地图使用任务。
