Poster #27 - Developing an extended mind: Do children manually rotate stimuli to alleviate mental rotation demands?

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Humans often interact with the environment in order to increase the efficiency of our cognitive processing, thus blurring the distinction between the mind and the external world (Gilbert, 2015; Risko, 2014; Risko & Gilbert, 2016). For instance, we wear glasses and hearing aids to augment our perceptual abilities, we set alarms and other external reminders to increase our chances of future memory retrieval, and we physically rotate maps to assist in navigation. Although many philosophers accept the existence of this “extended mind” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), almost nothing is known about the development of children’s strategic use of physical action to alleviate cognitive demand.

We developed a novel minimalist paradigm to examine when children begin to manually rotate stimuli in order to alleviate mental rotation demands. Children aged between 4 and 11 years (N = 132) were presented with stimulus sheets on a rotatable turntable. Each stimulus sheet showed a number of stick figures that varied on two dimensions: (1) they had either a blue or red face, and (2) their arms were pointed either up or down (see Figure 1). In a 2x2 within-subjects design, stimulus sheets were presented with the stick figures in either an upright or inverted orientation, and children were asked to count either the blue figures or the figures with their arms up. They were instructed to count the figures as quickly as possible and, critically, were given permission to manually rotate the turntable whenever they wished.

Although counting figures with blue faces is equally easy in both stimulus orientations, counting figures with arms up is more cognitively demanding when the figures are inverted than when they are upright. Thus, strategic manual rotation was considered to be evident if children only rotated the turntable when counting inverted figures with their arms up (and not when counting blue faces).

Consistent with predictions, older children were significantly more likely to show strategic manual rotation than younger children. Indeed, the proportion of children who only rotated the turntable when counting inverted figures with their arms up increased linearly with age, with 11.8% of 4-5 year-olds, 23.5% of 6-7 year-olds, 37.5% of 8-9 year-olds, and 62.5% of 10-11 year-olds showing this response pattern respectively, χ2(1) = 14.66, p < .001, Cochran-Armitage trend test. Many of the non-strategic children also chose to rotate the turntable on some trials, but they did so even when it was unnecessary (see Figure 2).

Our results indicate that strategic manual rotation may primarily develop in middle childhood, with the majority of children not behaving optimally on the task until they were 10 or 11 years old. These findings roughly correspond with the broader literature on metacognitive control, which suggests that only around this age do children begin to strategically allocate behavioural resources to particularly demanding cognitive tasks (Schneider & Loffler, 2016). Given the increasing prevalence of individual-environment interactions in all domains of modern society, we strongly recommend that future studies devote more attention to the development of the extended mind.

Authors

• Kristy Armitage, University of Queensland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Adam Bulley, University of Queensland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jonathan Redshaw, University of Queensland
  Presenting Author