Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2012 Dec;113(4):523-34. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.06.012. Epub 2012 Aug 9.
Spatial reasoning, a crucial skill for everyday actions, develops gradually during the first several years of childhood. Previous studies have shown that perceptual information and problem solving strategies are critical for successful spatial reasoning in young children. Here, we sought to link these two factors by examining children's use of perceptual color cues and whether their use of such cues would lead to the acquisition of a general problem solving strategy. Forty-eight 3-year-olds were asked to predict the trajectory of a ball dropped into one of three intertwined tubes. Children who received additional perceptual cues in the form of distinctly colored tubes succeeded twice as often as those who did not receive the cues. A third group of children who received the additional cues on only the first half of the test trials succeeded while the cues were present but reverted to making errors once they were removed. These findings demonstrate that perceptual color cues provide preschoolers with answers to spatial reasoning problems but might not teach children a general strategy for solving the problem.
空间推理能力是日常生活中至关重要的技能，在儿童成长的最初几年中逐渐发展。先前的研究表明，感知信息和解决问题的策略对于幼儿成功进行空间推理至关重要。在这里，我们通过研究儿童对感知颜色线索的使用情况，以及他们是否使用这些线索来获得一般的解决问题策略，将这两个因素联系起来。我们要求 48 名 3 岁儿童预测一个球落入三个相互交织的管子之一的轨迹。那些在形状上明显不同的彩色管子中获得额外感知线索的儿童的成功率是没有获得这些线索的儿童的两倍。第三组儿童在前半部分测试中获得了额外的线索，而当这些线索存在时，他们成功了，但一旦移除，他们就会再次犯错。这些发现表明，感知颜色线索为学龄前儿童提供了空间推理问题的答案，但可能并没有教儿童解决问题的一般策略。
