Feldman A, Acredolo L
Child Dev. 1979 Sep;50(3):698-704.
The effect of active exploration upon memory for spatial location of an event was assessed for children at 2 age levels. Each child took a walk through the same unfamiliar hallway in search of a hidden object which he was later asked to relocate. Half the children were accompanied by an adult holding their hand (passive condition), while the other half proceeded on their own with an adult following behind (active condition). An age x condition interaction revealed that active exploration significantly improved performance of the 3- and 4-year-old group while not affecting the performance of the 9- and 10-year-olds. The 3- and 4-year-olds in the active condition, however, were still significantly less accurate than the older children, despite their experience of self-directed exploration. The results are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that self-directed activity serves to increase attention of preoperational children to relevant topological cues in the environment, whereas concrete operational children, due to their knowledge of projective and Euclidean space, demonstrate increased capacity to efficiently encode spatial information regardless of the mode of exploration.
研究评估了主动探索对两个年龄组儿童事件空间位置记忆的影响。每个孩子都在同一条陌生的走廊里散步，寻找一个隐藏的物体，之后要求他们重新找到该物体的位置。一半的孩子由一位牵着他们手的成年人陪同（被动条件），而另一半孩子则自己前行，后面跟着一位成年人（主动条件）。年龄×条件的交互作用表明，主动探索显著提高了3岁和4岁组儿童的表现，而对9岁和10岁儿童的表现没有影响。然而，处于主动条件下的3岁和4岁儿童，尽管有自主探索的经历，但与年龄较大的儿童相比，准确性仍然显著较低。研究结果被解释为支持以下假设：自主活动有助于提高前运算阶段儿童对环境中相关拓扑线索的注意力，而具体运算阶段的儿童，由于他们对射影空间和欧几里得空间的了解，无论探索方式如何，都表现出更强的有效编码空间信息的能力。
