School of Psychology, Aston University.
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2024 Apr;153(4):889-912. doi: 10.1037/xge0001265. Epub 2022 Aug 4.
The way in which organisms represent the shape of their environments during navigation has been debated in cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology. While there is evidence that adult humans encode the entire boundary shape of an environment (a global-shape representation), there are also data demonstrating that organisms reorient using only segments of the boundary that signal a goal location (a local-shape representation). Developmental studies offer unique insights into this debate; however, most studies have used designs that cannot dissociate the type of boundary-shape representation that children use to guide reorientation. Thus, we examined the developmental trajectories of children's reorientation according to local and global boundary shape. Participants aged 6-12 years were trained to find a goal hidden in one corner of a virtual arena, after which they were required to reorient in a novel test arena. From 10.5 years, children performed above chance when the test arena permitted reorientation based only on local-shape (Experiment 2), or only global-shape (Experiment 3) information. Moreover, when these responses were placed into conflict, older children reoriented with respect to global-shape information (Experiment 4). These age-related findings were not due to older children being better able to reorient in virtual environments per se: when trained and tested within the same environment (Experiment 1), children performed above chance from 6 years. Together, our results suggest (a) the ability to reorient on the basis of global- and local-shape representations develops in parallel, and (b) shape-based information is weighted to determine which representation informs reorientation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
在认知、比较和发展心理学中，关于生物体在导航过程中如何表示环境形状的问题一直存在争议。虽然有证据表明，成年人类会对环境的整个边界形状进行编码（全局形状表示），但也有数据表明，生物体仅使用表示目标位置的边界片段进行重新定向（局部形状表示）。发展研究为这场争论提供了独特的见解；然而，大多数研究采用的设计无法区分儿童用于引导重新定向的边界形状表示类型。因此，我们根据局部和全局边界形状检查了儿童重新定向的发展轨迹。6-12 岁的参与者接受了在虚拟竞技场一角隐藏目标的训练，然后要求他们在新的测试竞技场中重新定向。从 10.5 岁开始，当测试竞技场仅允许基于局部形状（实验 2）或仅全局形状（实验 3）信息进行重新定向时，儿童的表现优于偶然。此外，当这些反应发生冲突时，年龄较大的儿童会根据全局形状信息进行重新定向（实验 4）。这些与年龄相关的发现并不是因为年龄较大的儿童本身更能够在虚拟环境中重新定向：当在相同的环境中进行训练和测试时（实验 1），儿童从 6 岁开始表现出高于偶然的水平。总的来说，我们的结果表明：(a) 基于全局和局部形状表示进行重新定向的能力是平行发展的；(b) 形状信息是加权的，以确定哪个表示形式告知重新定向。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2024 APA，保留所有权利）。
