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Shape But Not Color Facilitates Two‐Year‐Olds’ Search Performance in a Spatial Rotation Task
Author(s) -
Ebersbach Mirjam,
Nawroth Christian
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
infancy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.361
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1532-7078
pISSN - 1525-0008
DOI - 10.1111/infa.12259
Subject(s) - task (project management) , object permanence , psychology , rotation (mathematics) , salient , object (grammar) , mental rotation , dimension (graph theory) , artificial intelligence , spatial ability , cognitive psychology , communication , computer vision , computer science , mathematics , cognition , cognitive development , combinatorics , management , neuroscience , economics
Children younger than 3 years of age often fail to track hidden objects that are rotated together with identical hiding containers, which might be due to relatively complex paradigms. We examined whether 2‐year‐olds ( N = 28) are already able to track spatial rotations (i.e., by 90° and 180°) if the task is facilitated by increasing the visual discriminability of the hiding containers by means of different shapes and different colors. Children performed above chance level in all conditions except for the condition in which containers had the same color and shape and were rotated by 180°. Moreover, children found the hidden object more often when the containers had different—as compared to identical—shapes, whereas performance was similar when the containers had the same or different colors. Furthermore, their performance was better after 90° rotations than after 180° rotations and children in all conditions showed an inhibition bias. Our findings suggest that 2‐year‐olds are already able to track spatial rotations if the task is kept simple and focuses solely on the ability of interest. In addition, young children use shape—rather than color—as a salient dimension in spatial rotation tasks.