Department of Psychology, Temple University.
Department of Psychology, University of Bern.
Dev Psychol. 2014 May;50(5):1614-9. doi: 10.1037/a0035905. Epub 2014 Feb 17.
Spatial scaling is an important prerequisite for many spatial tasks and involves an understanding of how distances in different-sized spaces correspond. Previous studies have found evidence for such an understanding in preschoolers; however, the mental processes involved remain unclear. In the present study, we investigated whether children and adults use mental transformations to scale distances in space. Adults and 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 60) were asked to use maps to locate target objects in a larger referent space on a touch screen. The size of the referent space was held constant, but the sizes of the maps were varied systematically, resulting in 7 scaling factors. A linear increase in response times and errors with increasing scaling factor suggested that participants of every age group mentally transformed the size of the map to compare it to the referent, providing evidence for an analog imagery strategy in children's and adults' spatial scaling.
空间缩放是许多空间任务的重要前提，涉及到对不同大小空间中距离的对应关系的理解。先前的研究已经在学龄前儿童中发现了这种理解的证据；然而，所涉及的心理过程尚不清楚。在本研究中，我们调查了儿童和成人是否使用心理变换来缩放空间中的距离。成人和 4 至 5 岁的儿童（N = 60）被要求使用地图在触摸屏上的较大参照空间中定位目标物体。参照空间的大小保持不变，但地图的大小系统地变化，产生了 7 个缩放因子。随着缩放因子的增加，反应时间和错误呈线性增加，这表明每个年龄组的参与者都在心理上变换了地图的大小，以便与参照进行比较，这为儿童和成人的空间缩放中的类比意象策略提供了证据。
