Department of Psychology and Human Development, University of London, London, UK.
Res Dev Disabil. 2012 May-Jun;33(3):900-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ridd.2011.11.017. Epub 2012 Jan 11.
Typically developing (TD) 6-year-olds and 9-year-olds, and older children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) navigated through brick-wall mazes in a virtual environment. Participants were shown a route through three mazes, each with 6 turns. In each maze the floor of each path section was a different colour such that colour acted as an environmental cue. The colours employed were either easy to verbalise (focal colours) or difficult to verbalise (non-focal colours). We investigated whether participants would verbally code the colour information in the focal colour condition only, and whether this facilitated route-learning. All groups could learn the routes; the WS group required more learning trials to learn the route and achieved lower memory scores than both of the TD groups. Despite this, all groups showed the same pattern of results. There was no effect of condition on the ability to learn the maze. However, when asked which colours featured in each route, higher memory scores were achieved for the focal colour (verbalisable) than the non-focal colour (non-verbalisable) condition. This suggests that, in both young children and individuals with WS, once a route has been learnt, the nature of the environmental cues within it can impact an individual's representation of that route.
典型发展（TD）的 6 岁和 9 岁儿童以及患有威廉姆斯综合征（WS）的大龄儿童和成人在虚拟环境中穿过砖墙迷宫。参与者被展示了三条迷宫中的一条路线，每条路线有 6 个转弯。在每个迷宫中，每个路径部分的地板都是不同的颜色，因此颜色充当了环境提示。使用的颜色要么容易口头表达（焦点颜色），要么难以口头表达（非焦点颜色）。我们研究了参与者是否只会在焦点颜色条件下对颜色信息进行口头编码，以及这是否有助于路线学习。所有组都可以学习路线；WS 组需要更多的学习试验来学习路线，并且记忆得分低于两个 TD 组。尽管如此，所有组都表现出相同的结果模式。条件对学习迷宫的能力没有影响。然而，当被问及每条路线中包含哪些颜色时，对于焦点颜色（可口头表达）的记忆得分高于非焦点颜色（不可口头表达）条件。这表明，在幼儿和 WS 个体中，一旦学习了路线，路线内环境提示的性质就会影响个体对该路线的表示。
