Poster #29 - Do Close and Far Labels Aid Young Children's Coding of Relative Proximity?

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Remembering and communicating about location often involves comparisons of relative proximity. Such comparisons can involve determining which of two landmarks is closer to an object (e.g., a pair of shoes is located closer to the couch than to the chair), or which of two objects is closer to a landmark (e.g., one glass is closer to the sink than another glass). However, most previous research has focused on how young children code the proximity of a single object to a single landmark. Here we examined how memory for relative proximity develops during early childhood and whether including close and far labels to describe the target location during encoding facilitates memory for the target location.
To address these questions, 52 children between the ages of 24 and 30 months watched an experimenter hide two different toys in two identical containers placed 2 and 12 inches from a circle that served as a landmark. In the no-label condition, the experimenter hid the objects while using neutral language (e.g., “I’m hiding the fish here and the apple here.”). In the label condition, the experimenter hid the objects while describing each object’s location (e.g., “I’m hiding the fish in the jar close to the circle and I’m hiding the apple in the jar far from the circle.”). After a 10-second delay during which parents carried children outside of the room to an opening on the opposite side of the room (Figure 1), children were asked to search for the target toy. There were two trial types that varied the position of the target and non-target containers relative to the landmark, one with the target container close to the circle (“close trials”) and one with the target container far from the circle (“far trials”). The proportion of correct searches by condition and trial type were analyzed.
As shown in Figure 2, we found that children in both conditions searched correctly at levels significantly above chance on close trials, t(31)=6.22, p<.0001 and t(19)=3.72, p= 001, and on far trials, t(31)=3.31, p=.002 and t(19)=9.05, p<.0001, for the no label and label conditions respectively (though children were far from perfect on both close and far trials). Moreover, we found that providing “close” and “far” labels during encoding to describe the target and non-target locations significantly improved performance on far trials, F(1,50)=5.00, p=.03, but labels did not significantly improve performance on close trials, F(1,50)=.631, ns.
These results suggest that 2-year-old children can code relative proximity to a landmark with or without the presence of close and far labels. However, these results also suggest that labels improve performance when the target location is far from a landmark. This latter finding is consistent with the proximal-to-distal shift observed in early development. Specifically, young children may not need labels to remember locations that are closer to a landmark because they tend to rely on proximal cues before they rely on distal cues. More generally, this work suggests that even at very young ages, spatial language serves as a scaffold for spatial memory.

Authors

• Megan Lorenz, The University of Iowa
  Presenting Author

• Makayla A. Carlton, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nora A Tucker, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jodie Plumert, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author