Forming a stable spatial representation

Authors: Banchiamlack Dessalegn Barbara Landau

Publish Date: 2006/08/09

Volume: 7, Issue: 1, Pages: 27-27

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Abstract

The visual system sometimes fails partially or completely to encode and/or retrieve spatial relations among parts of an object For example targets can easily be confused with their mirror images especially when they must be retained in memory In the current experiments we ask whether our representations of spatial relations can be amended by information from different cognitive domains Specifically we ask whether failure to form a stable representation of spatial relations among parts can be overcome by the use of linguistic information Four yearolds saw squares split by color and matched them after delay In Experiment 1 children saw the target and were told either “Look this is a blicket” Label Condition or “Look” NoLabel Condition Then three choices appeared the target eg vertical split with red left green right its mirror image and another square that had a different internal split eg horizontal Overall children performed better than chance However their errors were almost exclusively mirror image confusions suggesting that children failed to bind color and location eg red left green right There was no difference between the NoLabel and Label conditions suggesting the wholeobject novel label did not help children form a stable representation of the spatial relation among the parts Experiment 2 tested whether color–location binding can be improved by providing language that might bind these features Children were shown a target and were told eg “The red is on the left” Performance was reliably better than in Experiment 1 suggesting language did help children bind color and location Experiments 3 and 4 explored whether the same performance improvement could be accomplished by increasing nonlinguistic attention to the target ie flashing the red part Experiment 3 or by using neutral relational language eg “The red is touching the green” Neither experiment showed enhanced performance suggesting that language can augment visual–spatial representations only if it conveys very specific information eg direction Generally the results suggest that specific linguistic information can help form a stable representation of spatial relationship and that this effect is not attributable to general attentional effects

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