Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Fabrikstraße 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, Temple University, Weiss Hall 318, 1701 North 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122-6085, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2014 Oct;18(10):536-42. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2014.05.011. Epub 2014 Jun 24.
Mental representation and transformation of spatial information is often examined with mental rotation (MR) tasks, which require deciding whether a rotated image is the same as or the mirror version of an upright image. Recent research with infants shows early discrimination of objects from mirror-image versions. However, even at the age of 4 years, many children perform at near chance level on more standard measures. Similar age discrepancies can be observed in other domains, including perspective taking, theory of mind, and intuitive physics. These paradoxical results raise the questions of how performance relates to competence and how to conceptualize developmental change. There may be a common underlying mechanism: the development of the ability to imagine things and mentally transform them in a prospective fashion.
空间信息的心理表征和转换通常通过心理旋转（MR）任务来进行研究，该任务要求判断旋转后的图像是否与垂直图像相同或镜像版本。最近对婴儿的研究表明，他们可以早期区分物体与其镜像版本。然而，即使在 4 岁时，许多儿童在更标准的测量中表现出接近机会水平。在其他领域，包括视角、心理理论和直觉物理等，也可以观察到类似的年龄差异。这些矛盾的结果提出了以下问题：表现与能力之间的关系如何，以及如何概念化发展变化。可能存在一个共同的潜在机制：想象事物并以前瞻性方式在心理上对其进行转换的能力的发展。
