Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milan, Italy.
NeuroMi, Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2017 May 26;7(1):2437. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-02466-w.
A wealth of studies show that human adults map ordered information onto a directional spatial continuum. We asked whether mapping ordinal information into a directional space constitutes an early predisposition, already functional prior to the acquisition of symbolic knowledge and language. While it is known that preverbal infants represent numerical order along a left-to-right spatial continuum, no studies have investigated yet whether infants, like adults, organize any kind of ordinal information onto a directional space. We investigated whether 7-month-olds' ability to learn high-order rule-like patterns from visual sequences of geometric shapes was affected by the spatial orientation of the sequences (left-to-right vs. right-to-left). Results showed that infants readily learn rule-like patterns when visual sequences were presented from left to right, but not when presented from right to left. This result provides evidence that spatial orientation critically determines preverbal infants' ability to perceive and learn ordered information in visual sequences, opening to the idea that a left-to-right spatially organized mental representation of ordered dimensions might be rooted in biologically-determined constraints on human brain development.
大量研究表明，人类成年人将有序信息映射到一个有方向的空间连续体上。我们想知道，将ordinal 信息映射到一个有方向的空间是否构成了一种早期的倾向，这种倾向在获得符号知识和语言之前就已经存在了。虽然已经知道，婴儿在语言出现之前就会沿着从左到右的空间连续体来表示数字顺序，但还没有研究探讨婴儿是否像成年人一样将任何种类的ordinal 信息组织到一个有方向的空间中。我们研究了 7 个月大的婴儿是否能够从视觉形状序列中学习高阶规则样模式，而这些视觉序列的空间方向（从左到右与从右到左）是否会影响他们的学习能力。结果表明，当视觉序列从左到右呈现时，婴儿很容易学习规则样模式，但当序列从右到左呈现时，他们就无法学习。这个结果提供了证据，证明空间方向对于婴儿在视觉序列中感知和学习有序信息的能力具有关键性的决定作用，这也暗示了一种观点，即有方向的空间组织的有序维度的心理表征可能根植于人类大脑发育的生物决定限制。
