The Spatial Coding Strategies of One-Year-Old Infants in a Locomotor Search Task

• Published in: Child development Vol. 66; no. 4; pp. 937 - 958
• Main Authors: Bushnell, Emily W., McKenzie, Beryl E., Lawrence, Deborah A., Connell, Sheryl
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Malden, MA University of Chicago Press 01.08.1995; Blackwell; University of Chicago Press for the Society for Research in Child Development, etc; Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Subjects: Binomials; Biological and medical sciences; Child Development; Coding; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive Development; Cognitive Processes; Cues; Developmental psychology; Diagrams; Experiment design; Experimentation; Female; Frame of Reference; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Infant; Infants; Information search behavior; Landmarks; Locomotion; Male; Memory; Newborn. Infant; Object Retrieval; Perception; Perception Tests; Perceptual Development; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Search tasks; Space Perception; Spatial Ability; Spatial Behavior; Spatial Cues; Spatial information processing; Spatial Orientation; Spatial Tasks; Task Performance and Analysis; Toys; Human; Locomotion; Stimulus distance; Stimulus localization; Coding; Spatial ability; Infant; Strategy; Cognition; Cognitive development; Stimulus direction; Spatial memory
• ISSN: 0009-3920; 1467-8624
• DOI: 10.2307/1131790

The ability of 1-year-old infants to remember the location of a nonvisible target was investigated in 3 experiments. Infants searched for a toy hidden in one of many possible locations within a circular bounded space. The presence, number, and spatial arrangement of local cues or "landmarks" within this space were varied. The results of Experiment 1 showed that search performance was highly successful when a landmark was coincident with the location of the toy ("direct"), but less successful when a landmark was adjacent to the target location ("indirect"). The results of Experiment 2 suggested that search with an indirect landmark may be more fragile than search with no landmarks at all. In Experiments 3a and 3b, 2 different configurations of indirect landmarks were employed; search performance was equally poor with both of these and was inferior to search with no landmarks. It is concluded that infants of this age are able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and are able to code the distance and direction of a target with respect to themselves or with respect to the larger framework. However, there was no evidence that they can code the distance and direction of a target relative to another object. The difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks is interpreted in terms of cognitive complexity and conflict between spatial strategies.