3-029 - Process-based approaches to understanding spatial development: the role of attention, language, and gesture

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Prior research has established the importance of spatial skills for everyday behavior and achievement in math and science. However, open questions exist regarding the development of these important skills. Taking a process-based approach, this symposium presents research using both implicit and explicit measures to elucidate mechanisms involved in spatial development.

Paper 1 examines implicit mental rotation processes in young children and adults using a novel pupillometry measure. Developmental differences in pupillary responses were found, suggesting that adults, but not 4-year-olds, engaged in mental rotation when presented with an implicit task. Paper 2 investigates the role of language in spatial development. The researchers created an interactive assessment of dimensional adjectives and showed that children’s dimensional adjective vocabulary related to their performance only on tasks requiring relational thinking. Paper 3 uses head-mounted eye-tracking to examine children’s attention during spatial tasks and how experimenter-provided language and visual cues differently influence attention to support performance. The results showed that individual differences in eye-gaze patterns related to spatial performance. Additionally, language and visual cues both supported performance by directing visual attention, but language also influenced performance in other ways. Paper 4 investigates children’s analogical reasoning, assessing the influence of inhibitory control and gesture training using eye-tracking. Children with higher inhibitory control performed better and showed distinct looking patterns. Additionally, children who received speech and gesture training relative to speech-only training showed looking patterns similar to children with high inhibitory control. This suggested that gesture training benefits analogical reasoning by facilitating inhibitory control.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Hilary Miller, Emory University

Individual Presentations

• Developmental differences in spatial transformation processes: A pupillometry study - Presenting Author: Jillian E Lauer, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Patricia Bauer, Emory University

• Individual differences in preschoolers’ spatial cognition: Role of spatial-relational language in predicting spatial thinking - Presenting Author: Rosalie Odean, Florida International University; Non-Presenting Author: Carla Abad, Florida International University; Non-Presenting Author: Shannon M Pruden, Florida International University

• Using head-mounted eye-tracking to understand effects of language on children’s spatial skills - Presenting Author: Hilary Miller, Emory University; Non-Presenting Author: Heather Kirkorian, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Author: Vanessa Simmering, ACTNext by ACT, Inc.

• Using Co-speech Gesture to Support Children’s Inhibitory Control during Analogical Reasoning - Presenting Author: Katharine F Guarino, Loyola University Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Robert G. Morrison, Loyola University Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Lindsey Richland, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Elizabeth Wakefield, Loyola University Chicago