University of Giessen Giessen, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2013 Mar 4;4:97. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00097. eCollection 2013.
The present experiment examined whether the mental rotation ability of 9-month-old infants was related to their abilities to crawl and manually explore objects. Forty-eight 9-month-old infants were tested; half of them had been crawling for an average of 9.3 weeks. The infants were habituated to a video of a simplified Shepard-Metzler object rotating back and forth through a 240° angle around the longitudinal axis of the object. They were tested with videos of the same object rotating through a previously unseen 120° angle and with a mirror image of the display. All of the infants also participated in a manual object exploration task, in which they freely explored five toy blocks. The results showed that the crawlers looked significantly longer at the novel (mirror) object than at the familiar object, independent of their manual exploration scores. The non-crawlers looking times, in contrast, were influenced by the manual exploration scores. The infants who did not spontaneously explore the toy blocks tended to show a familiarity preference, whereas those who explored the toy blocks preferred to look at the novel object. Thus, all of the infants were able to master the mental rotation task but it seemed to be the most complex process for infants who had no crawling experience and who did not spontaneously explore objects.
本实验检验了 9 个月大婴儿的心理旋转能力是否与其爬行和手动探索物体的能力有关。48 名 9 个月大的婴儿接受了测试；其中一半的婴儿已经平均爬行 9.3 周。婴儿们习惯了一段简化的 Shepard-Metzler 物体通过物体的纵轴前后旋转 240°的视频。他们观看了相同物体旋转 120°的以前未见过的视频和显示的镜像。所有婴儿还参加了手动物体探索任务，在该任务中，他们自由探索五个玩具块。结果表明，与熟悉的物体相比，爬行婴儿明显注视新（镜像）物体的时间更长，而与他们的手动探索得分无关。相比之下，非爬行婴儿的注视时间受到手动探索得分的影响。那些没有自发探索玩具块的婴儿往往表现出熟悉的偏好，而那些探索玩具块的婴儿则更喜欢看新的物体。因此，所有婴儿都能够掌握心理旋转任务，但对于没有爬行经验且没有自发探索物体的婴儿来说，这似乎是最复杂的过程。
