Sorrentino Pierpaolo, Lardone Anna, Pesoli Matteo, Liparoti Marianna, Montuori Simone, Curcio Giuseppe, Sorrentino Giuseppe, Mandolesi Laura, Foti Francesca
Department of Engineering, Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope, Naples, Italy.
Department of Movement Sciences and Wellbeing, Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope, Naples, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2019 Mar 29;10:728. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00728. eCollection 2019.
The present study is aimed at investigating the development of spatial memory in pre-school children aged 4-6 years using an ecological walking task with multiple rewards. The participants were to explore an open space in order to find nine rewards placed in buckets arranged in three spatial configurations: a Cross, a 3 × 3 Matrix, and a Cluster composed of three groups of three buckets each. Clear age-related improvements were evident in all the parameters analyzed. In fact, there was a general trend for younger children to display worse performance than the older ones. Moreover, males performed better than females in both the search efficiency and visiting all buckets. Additionally, the search efficiency proved to be a function of the difficulty of the configuration to be explored: the Matrix and Cluster configurations were easier to explore than the Cross configuration. Taken altogether, the present findings suggest that there is a general improvement in the spatial memory abilities in preschoolers and that solving an open space task could be influenced by gender. Moreover, it can be proposed that both the procedural competences and the memory load requested to explore a specific environment are determined by its specific features.
本研究旨在使用带有多重奖励的生态行走任务，调查4至6岁学龄前儿童空间记忆的发展情况。参与者要探索一个开放空间，以找到放置在按三种空间布局排列的桶中的九个奖励：一个十字形、一个3×3矩阵和一个由三组每组三个桶组成的簇。在所有分析的参数中，明显存在与年龄相关的改善。事实上，总体趋势是年龄较小的儿童表现比年龄较大的儿童差。此外，在搜索效率和访问所有桶方面，男性比女性表现更好。此外，搜索效率被证明是要探索的布局难度的一个函数：矩阵和簇布局比十字形布局更容易探索。总的来说，目前的研究结果表明，学龄前儿童的空间记忆能力有普遍提高，解决开放空间任务可能受性别影响。此外，可以提出，探索特定环境所需的程序能力和记忆负荷均由其特定特征决定。
