Learning to Align Relations: The Effects of Feedback and Self-Explanation

Relational similarity connects superficially dissimilar objects and events. In 2 experiments, the ability to recognize and respond to similar relations was studied in children ages 3 to 5 with 2 comparison tasks. Children interpreted illustrated pictures that shared perceptual or relational aspects and then made 2 comparison choices and explanations of these choices. Results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that when given explicit feedback regarding the relations depicted in the pictures, children learned to respond quickly to this type of similarity in subsequent trials, which involved novel relations. In Experiment 2, the effect of re- explanation on relational understanding was examined. Children age 4.5 to 5 years, but not 3- to 4-year-olds, showed relational learning when asked to explain the experimenter's relational choice.     

Relational language and the development of relational mapping

We test the claim that learning and using language for spatial relations can influence spatial representation and reasoning. Preschool children were given a mapping task in which they were asked to find a "winner" placed in a three-tiered box after seeing one placed in a virtually identical box. The correct choice was determined by finding the corresponding relative location in the test box, making it a difficult task for preschool children. We found that hearing language for spatial relations facilitated children's mapping performance. We found effects at younger ages on easier tasks (Experiments 1 and 2) and at older ages on harder tasks (Experiment 3). The effects of spatial relational language differed predictably according to the semantics of the terms children heard (Experiment 4). Finally, the effects of spatial language were maintained over time (Experiment 5): children given one initial exposure to the spatial terms maintained their advantage over baseline children when they again carried out the mapping task 2 days later, with no further exposure to the spatial terms. The evidence is consistent with the explanation that language bolsters children's spatial encodings, which in turn supports their mapping performance.     

Representation and Perseveration: Influences on Young Children's Representational Insight

We carried out 3 experiments to determine what role different task demands play in 2.5-year-old children's performance on DeLoache's (1987) model-room task. The results of Experiment 1 reveal that the size of the toy to be retrieved had little bearing on performance; only the size of the spaces affected performance. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the large number of perseverative errors produced by children in these tasks was not reduced when the toy on each of the 4 test trials was changed and, thus, further suggested that characteristics of the toy had little influence on performance. Experiment 3 showed that elimination of the possibility of perseverative response through removal of the previously used hiding locations did not facilitate transfer. The results point to conceptual inflexibility or difficulty of engagement in dual representation associated with the search space as important contributors to the lack of representational insight demonstrated by 2.5-year-old children.     

Conflicting desire and the child's theory of mind

We contrast the standard representational theory-of-mind approach to the understanding of mental states with an alternative view that theory-of-mind tasks require executive functioning or the inhibition of more “cognitively salient” information. Two experiments test the hypothesis that 3-year-olds' apparent problems on theory-of-mind tasks are not due to an inability to represent the mental contents of another, but rather lie in the informational structure of the task. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on their understanding of desire in others either when they themselves held a strong and conflicting desire or when they had no strong desire. Results showed that under the condition of having a strong and conflicting desire, only 5-year-olds were able to recognize that another person may desire something different. In contrast, when the children themselves held no strong desire, even 3-year-olds were able to judge another's desire correctly. Experiment 2 compared 3-year-olds' performance on a standard false-belief task with an equivalently structured desire task in which participants had again to inhibit their own strong and conflicting desire. Results showed similar performance on the traditional false-belief task and the new conflicting-desire task.     

A lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution in young children: Relationships with linguistic ability and mothers' mental‐state language

This study examines the contribution of children's linguistic ability and mothers' use of mental‐state language to young children's understanding of false belief and their subsequent ability to make belief‐based emotion attributions. In Experiment 1, children (N = 51) were given three belief‐based emotion‐attribution tasks. A standard task in which the protagonist was a story character and the emotional outcomes were imagined, and two videos in which the story protagonist was a real infant and the emotional outcomes were observable (high and low expressed emotion conditions). Children's verbal ability (semantic competence) was also measured. In Experiment 2, children (N = 75) were given two belief‐based emotion tasks: the standard story task and the high expressed emotion video. In addition, children's verbal ability (syntactic competence) and mothers' use of mental‐state attributes when describing their children were also measured. The results showed that: (1) the lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution was a stable feature of children's reasoning across the three tests; and (2) children who were more linguistically advanced and whose mothers' described them in more mentalistic terms were more likely to understand the association between false belief and emotion. The findings underline the continuing importance of verbal ability and linguistic input for children's developing theory‐of‐mind understanding, even after they display an understanding of false belief.     

Retrieval of Episodic Information From Memory: Comparisons Among 3- and 4-Year-Olds, 7- and 8-Year-Olds,and Adults

Young children's and adults' recall of episodic information was explored in 4 experiments. The task required participants to recall a target noun presented as the last item of a 4-noun string of related (either categorically or thematically) or unrelated words. Providing all 3 preceding nouns or a subset of them cued recall. Experiment 1 found that 7- and 8-year-old children's recall was better with pictures as opposed to text, and children showed performance equal to adults with thematically related pictorial stimuli. Using pictorial stimuli, Experiment 2 showed that the number of cues present at retrieval affected 7- and 8-year-olds' recall. Experiments 3 and 4 tested recall of episodic information in 3- and 4-year-olds using pictorial stimuli. The results suggested that young children also have access to episodic information in memory and the number of cues present at retrieval influenced recall. The findings are discussed in the context of children's memory for events.     

Symbolic Insight and Inhibitory Control: Two Problems Facing Young Children on Symbolic Retrieval Tasks

Many recent studies have explored young children's ability to use information from physical representations of space to guide search within the real world. In one commonly used procedure, children are asked to find a hidden toy in a room after observing a smaller toy being hidden in the analogous location in a scale model of the room. Three-year-old children readily find the hidden toy, although children at 2.5 years often have difficulty with the task. This experiment examined the causes of 2.5-year-olds' difficultly with this symbol system by incorporating testing procedures previously used with chimpanzees. Results indicate that young children's poor performance primarily stems from a difficulty achieving symbolic insight (i.e., recognizing the model-room representational relationship) but is also strongly affected by deficits in inhibitory control.     

Exploring the effects of similarity on mapping spatial relations

Solving a map task requires transferring information acquired in one spatial context to another context, an ability that marks an important step in cognitive development. This study investigated how preschoolers’ mapping performance was affected by the extent of similarity between spaces. Whereas prior work examined effects of similarity in tasks involving matching individual objects, our tasks required considering spatial relations among objects. We found that the accuracy of mapping between two spaces with somewhat different perceptual features was higher than the accuracy of mapping between spaces with identical features. Yet, a further increase in differences between the two spaces had a detrimental effect on mapping. The results suggest that some degree of similarity between spaces is beneficial to children’s ability to transfer relational information. However, when the spaces have the same surface features, it may draw children’s attention to individual objects and inhibit their ability to focus on common relations across contexts.     

How does Sam feel?: Children's labelling and drawing of basic emotions

This study compares the ability of children aged from 6 to 11 to freely produce emotional labels based on detailed scenarios (labelling task), and their ability to depict basic emotions in their human figure drawing (subsequent drawing task). This comparison assesses the relevance of the use of a human figure drawing task in order to test children's comprehension of basic emotions. Such a comparison has never been undertaken up to now, the two tasks being seen as belonging to relatively separate fields of investigation. Results indicate corresponding developmental patterns for both tasks and a clear‐cut gap between simple emotions (happiness and sadness) and complex emotions (anger, fear, and disgust) in the ability to label and to depict basic emotions. These results suggest that a drawing task can be used to assess children's understanding of basic emotions. Results are discussed according to the development of perceptual skills and the development of emotion conceptualization.     

Making Probabilistic Relational Categories Learnable

Theories of relational concept acquisition (e.g., schema induction) based on structured intersection discovery predict that relational concepts with a probabilistic (i.e., family resemblance) structure ought to be extremely difficult to learn. We report four experiments testing this prediction by investigating conditions hypothesized to facilitate the learning of such categories. Experiment 1 showed that changing the task from a category‐learning task to choosing the “winning” object in each stimulus greatly facilitated participants' ability to learn probabilistic relational categories. Experiments 2 and 3 further investigated the mechanisms underlying this “who's winning” effect. Experiment 4 replicated and generalized the “who's winning” effect with more natural stimuli. Together, our findings suggest that people learn relational concepts by a process of intersection discovery akin to schema induction, and that any task that encourages people to discover a higher order relation that remains invariant over members of a category will facilitate the learning of putatively probabilistic relational concepts.     

Advanced Spatial Skills and Advance Planning: Components of 6-Year-Olds' Navigational Map Use

Two domains of cognitive development that have captured significant research attention are children's spatial cognition and children's planning skills. Children's ability to use maps for navigational purposes is a task in which these domains necessarily intersect. This study was designed to examine 6-year-olds' complex route formation and reorientation skills. Thirty-six kindergartners navigated through a large-scale environment using a map. Participants were required to plan their own routes to end-points designated only on the maps. Success at navigation, as well as route length and types of error, were assessed. The results indicate that kindergartners are able to use maps to plan and execute routes, and that they demonstrate advance planning skills by reliably selecting optimally efficient routes.     

The transformation of consequential functions in accordance with the relational frames of more-than and less-than

Across three experiments, the transformation of consequential functions in accordance with a seven-member relational network (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) was investigated. In this network, the relational rankings ranged from A, ranked the least, to G, ranked the most. In the first phase, contextual cues for more-than and less-than were established by training participants across multiple exemplars to select comparisons containing larger quantities in the presence of the former cue, and fewer quantities in the presence of the latter cue. Participants then were trained in six conditional discriminations (i.e., AD, F>E, and G>F) with the contextual cues as samples and nonsense words as comparisons, and all possible derived relations were tested (e.g., B相似文献   

Shared learning shapes human performance: Transfer effects in task sharing

We investigated whether performing a task with a co-actor shapes the way a subsequent task is performed. In four experiments participants were administered a Simon task after practicing a spatial compatibility task with an incompatible S-R mapping. In Experiment 1 they performed both tasks alongside another person; in Experiment 2 they performed the spatial compatibility task alone, responding to only one stimulus position, and the Simon task with another person; in Experiment 3, they performed the spatial compatibility task with another person and the Simon task alone; finally, in Experiment 4, they performed the spatial compatibility task alone and the Simon task with another person. The incompatible practice eliminated the Simon effect in Experiments 1 and 4. These results indicate that when a task is distributed between two participants with each one performing a different part of it, they tend to represent the whole task rather than their own part of it. This experience can influence the way a subsequent task is performed, as long as this latter occurs in a social context.     

Fimbria/fornix lesions facilitate the learning of a nonspatial response task

The spatial cognitive map theory of O’Keefe and Nadel (1978) predicts that lesions of the hippocampal system should impair learning on spatial tasks but not learning on nonspatial tasks. However, there is evidence that such lesions can facilitate learning on certain nonspatial tasks. Their theory does not predict such facilitation. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to expect that animals possessing a spatial cognitive map would have an inherent bias to engage a mapping strategy and thus be at a disadvantage on certain nonspatial tasks in comparison with animals without the mapping capacity and bias. In the present study, fimbria/fornix lesions impaired learning on a spatial task, but actually facilitated learning on a nonspatial task of equal difficulty. Thus, brain lesions that interfere with map functioning can facilitate learning on tasks for which a mapping strategy interferes with task solution. The results require a modification of the spatial cognitive map theory.     

Generating Relations Elicits a Relational Mindset in Children

Relational reasoning is a hallmark of human higher cognition and creativity, yet it is notoriously difficult to encourage in abstract tasks, even in adults. Generally, young children initially focus more on objects, but with age become more focused on relations. While prerequisite knowledge and cognitive resource maturation partially explains this pattern, here we propose a new facet important for children's relational reasoning development: a general orientation to relational information, or a relational mindset. We demonstrate that a relational mindset can be elicited, even in 4‐year‐old children, yielding greater than expected spontaneous attention to relations. Children either generated or listened to an experimenter state the relationships between objects in a set of formal analogy problems, and then in a second task, selected object or relational matches according to their preference. Children tended to make object mappings, but those who generated relations on the first task selected relational matches more often on the second task, signaling that relational attention is malleable even in young children.     

Mapping relational structure in spatial reasoning

Three experiments investigated whether the similarity of relational structures influences the interpretation of spatial representations. Adults were shown diagrams of hand gestures paired with simple statements and asked to judge the meaning of new gestures. In Experiment 1 the gestures were paired with active declarative statements. In Experiment 2, the gestures were paired with conjunctive and disjunctive relations. Experiment 3 used statements similar to those used in Experiment 1, but eliminated the initial object-to-object mapping provided in Experiments 1 and 2. In all three experiments, most participants chose an interpretation that set up a parallel relational structure between the gesture and its meaning: spatial elements were paired with conceptual elements and spatial relations were paired with conceptual relations. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that similarity of relational structures influences spatial reasoning, and have implications for analogical reasoning, diagrammatic reasoning, and language processing.     

4～6岁幼儿对口语和文字信息的信任及运用

研究以混合物分类为实验任务,探讨在面对口语和文字两种信息时,4~6岁中国幼儿的信任特点,在信任任务之后的即时和延时两个时间点上考察幼儿对所信任信息的运用,以及分析阅读水平对幼儿信息信任和运用的影响。研究结果表明:(1)4~6岁中国幼儿对不同类型信息都表现出高度信任,相较于口语信息,阅读水平高的幼儿表现出对文字信息的信任偏好;(2)幼儿在后续任务中较少运用所信任的信息,随着时间的推移,幼儿运用的口语信息持续减少,但文字信息的运用呈现先降后升的特点;(3)阅读水平在不同时间点上影响幼儿对所信任信息的运用,阅读水平低的幼儿在短时间内更多地运用口语信息,而阅读水平高的幼儿在更长时间里显著更多地使用文字信息。未来研究应进一步探究文字意识对幼儿文字信息信任和后续运用的作用。     

The role of relational reasoning in children's addition concepts

The study addresses the relational reasoning of different‐aged children and how addition reasoning is related to problem‐solving skills within addition and to reasoning skills outside addition. Ninety‐two 5‐ to 8‐year‐olds were asked to solve a series of conceptually related and unrelated addition problems, and the speed and accuracy of all self‐reported strategies were used to monitor their addition performance. Children were also given a series of general relational reasoning tasks to assess their ability to solve problems based on thematic, causal and visual relations. The results revealed that, while children were able to reason about commutativity relations, recognition of relations based on additive composition was rare. Furthermore, children's ability to reason about addition concepts increased with age and problem‐solving proficiency. Reasoning about addition concepts was related to performance on the thematic, causal and visual reasoning tasks for older children but not for younger children. Overall, the findings suggest that while children's early knowledge of addition relations is domain specific, as children develop in their broader reasoning abilities these developments enhance their addition reasoning.     

Concurrent Relations Between Perspective-Taking Skills,Desire Understanding,and Internal-State Vocabulary

Recent studies suggest that there appears to be a similar developmental sequence in the understanding of mental states in both internal-state language and in standard theory-of-mind tasks. These findings suggest possible developmental relations between children's ability to talk and think about the mind. Two experiments investigated the concurrent relations between internal-state vocabulary and theory-of-mind abilities in 30-month-old toddlers. In Experiment 1, children's internal-state language vocabulary was significantly and specifically related to their concurrent understanding of others' visual and emotional perspectives and was less strongly related to desire understanding. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings by examining the link between internal-state vocabulary and visual perspective-taking and comprehension of own versus other's desire, controlling for general verbal skills. Children with a more developed internal-state vocabulary performed better on perspective-taking tasks. These findings suggest that labeling and reasoning about mental states are related abilities at the early stages of theory-of-mind development.