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Drawing boundaries: From individual to common region – the development of spatial region attribution in children
Author(s) -
LangeKüttner C.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1348/026151005x50753
Subject(s) - psychology , attribution , coding (social sciences) , cognition , developmental psychology , spatial ability , stimulus (psychology) , similarity (geometry) , age groups , cognitive development , spatial cognition , cognitive psychology , social psychology , demography , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , mathematics , sociology , statistics , computer science , image (mathematics)
The study investigated at what age children draw boundaries around pairs of objects that share either similarity or proximity. In two studies ( N =132 and N =252) using a Wertheimer array, a clear age trend between 4 and 8 years showed that while young children were more likely to code objects into individual regions, older children were more likely to attribute common regions to pairs of dots. Unsystematic coding occurred as a transitional pattern until age 6, but except for the youngest group, at all ages a proportion of children drew boundaries of common region around arbitrary numbers of stimuli. Future research might show whether constructing exact, stimulus‐matched boundaries of common region is a performance predictor in other cognitive domains, such as visual memory.