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Previous studies measuring looking-time suggested that already infants possess intuitive knowledge about physical support. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether children were able...

Adults' mental rotation performance with body-like stimuli is enhanced if these stimuli are anatomically compatible with a human body, but decreased by anatomically incompatible stimuli. In this study, we investigated these effects for kindergartners and first-graders: When asked to mentally rotate cube configurations attached with human body parts in an anatomically compatible way, allowing for the projection of a human body, children performed better than with pure cube combinations. By contrast, when body parts were attached in an anatomically incompatible way, disallowing the projection of a human body, children performed worse than with pure combinations. This experiment is of specific interest against the background of two different theoretical approaches concerning imagery and the motor system in development: One approach assumes an increasing integration of motor processes and imagery over time that enables older children and adults to requisition motor resources for imagery processes, while the other postulates that imagery stems from early sensorimotor processes in the first place, and is disentangled from it over time. The finding that children of the two age groups tested show exactly the same effects as adults when mentally rotating anatomically compatible and incompatible stimuli is interpreted in favour of the latter approach. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? In mental rotation, adults perform better when rotating anatomically possible stimuli as compared to rotating standard cube combinations. Performance is worse when rotating anatomically impossible stimuli. What does this study add? The present study shows that children's mental transformations mirror those of adults in these respects. In case of the anatomically impossible stimuli, this highlights an inflexible use of embodiment in both age groups. This is in line with the Piagetian assumption of imagery being based on sensorimotor processes.

Abstract. Recent studies have ascertained a link between the motor system and imagery in children. A motor effect on imagery is demonstrated by the influence of stimuli-related movement constraints (i. e., constraints defined by the musculoskeletal system) on mental rotation, or by interference effects due to participants’ own body movements or body postures. This link is usually seen as qualitatively different or stronger in children as opposed to adults. In the present research, we put this interpretation to further scrutiny using a new paradigm: In a motor condition we asked our participants (kindergartners and third-graders) to manually rotate a circular board with a covered picture on it. This condition was compared with a perceptual condition where the board was rotated by an experimenter. Additionally, in a pure imagery condition, children were instructed to merely imagine the rotation of the board. The children’s task was to mark the presumed end position of a salient detail of the respective picture. The children’s performance was clearly the worst in the pure imagery condition. However, contrary to what embodiment theories would suggest, there was no difference in participants’ performance between the active rotation (i. e., motor) and the passive rotation (i. e., perception) condition. Control experiments revealed that this was also the case when, in the perception condition, gaze shifting was controlled for and when the board was rotated mechanically rather than by the experimenter. Our findings indicate that young children depend heavily on external support when imagining physical events. Furthermore, they indicate that motor-assisted imagery is not generally superior to perceptually driven dynamic imagery.

Mainly for methodological reasons, little is known about the course of development of early cognitive competencies diagnosed with the violation of expectation (VoE) method in infants. The goal of this research was to evaluate the use of pupillometry as a unified approach to assess expectancy violations during and beyond the "dark ages" between 1 and 3 years. We tested children aged 1-6 years and adults (N = 279) with pictures of animals combined with matching or mismatching animal sounds. All age groups exhibited significantly greater pupil dilation in mismatched than matched trials. We conclude that pupillometry is a viable alternative to the VoE method that, by contrast to the latter, can be used throughout the life span.

Until now, a successful application of the mental rotation paradigm was restricted to children 5 years or older. By contrast, recent findings suggest that even infants can perform mental rotation. Unlike the methods used in infant studies (looking time), our new research paradigm allows for the measurement and interpretation of reaction times. Kindergartners (aged 3–6 years) were presented with a stimulus configuration on a touchscreen and asked to bring a rotated stimulus into an upright position using the shortest path. Mean reaction time (RT) increased linearly with angular disparity. The ensuing linear trend was significant not only for the entire sample but also for the youngest age group analysed separately. To exclude the possibility that linearity was due to movement planning, 3-year-olds had to manually rotate a stimulus about the same trajectory without the need for a corresponding mental transformation in a second experiment. Here, no linear trend was observed. These results are interpreted as evidence for an analogue mental transformation in 3-year-olds, equal to the transformation processes in older children's and adults' mental rotation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Based on violation-of-expectation (VoE) paradigms, amazing cognitive competencies have been demonstrated in young infants, which could not be shown in toddlers or even preschoolers. This divergence might as much be caused by different research methods as by discontinuities in development. As looking-time measures are not readily applicable to older children, we suggest a new method that is suitable for children from two years of age onwards. In an empirical examination of this method, 26 children aged 2–7 years learned by trial and error to always find a target picture among a pair of pictures. Each target picture was an impossible version of the non-target picture. After reaching a learning criterion, children had to generalize the learned concept to pictures belonging to a different category. Results showed that even the youngest participants reached the learning criterion and were able to apply what they had learned to another category.

Motor influences on the mental transformation of body parts have been observed in both children and adults. Previous findings indicated that these influences were more pronounced in children than in adults, suggesting a stronger link between motor processes and imagery in children. The present series of two experiments casts doubt on the general validity of such an interpretation. Kindergartners' (aged 5–6 years), first graders' (aged 7 years), and adults' performance in the mental rotation of pictures of body parts was monitored for influences of internal representations of motor constraints (motor effect). In both experiments, evidence for mental rotation was obtained for each group. Unexpectedly, kindergarten boys made significantly more errors than kindergarten girls. A motor effect was only found in the second experiment, where it was least pronounced in the youngest age group. Our results suggest that mental transformations of body parts do not necessarily involve motor processes and that embodiment...

Zusammenfassung. In einem Reaktionszeitexperiment zur mentalen Rotation von Händen, an dem 138 Kindergartenkinder, 82 Grundschüler (2. Klassenstufe) und 82 Erwachsene teilnahmen, konnte ein Einfluss der motorischen Einschränkung von Handbewegungen auf die Vorstellung nachgewiesen werden. Dieser Motoreffekt war jedoch nicht in allen Altersgruppen und Bedingungen zu beobachten. Es konnte auch nicht bestätigt werden, dass er bei jüngeren Kindern generell stärker ausgeprägt ist als bei älteren Kindern und Erwachsenen. Dafür gab es Hinweise darauf, dass die Bedingungen, unter denen ein Motoreffekt auftritt, systematisch mit dem Alter variieren. Insbesondere war bei Kindergartenkindern ein Motoreffekt nur dann zu beobachten, wenn die eigene Handstellung mit der Perspektive auf die präsentierten Hände korrespondierte.

International audience; We examined whether body parts attached to abstract stimuli automatically force embodiment in a mental rotation task. In Experiment 1, standard cube combinations reflecting a human pose were added with (1) body parts on anatomically possible locations, (2) body parts on anatomically impossible locations, (3) colored end cubes, and (4) simple end cubes. Participants (N=30) had to decide whether two simultaneously presented stimuli, rotated in the picture plane, were identical or not. They were fastest and made less errors in the possible-body condition, but were slowest and least accurate in the impossible-body condition. A second experiment (N=32) replicated the results and ruled out that the poor performance in the impossible-body condition was due to the specific stimulus material. The findings of both experiments suggest that body parts automatically trigger embodiment, even when it is counterproductive and dramatically impairs performance, as in the impossible-body condition. It can furthermore be concluded that body parts cannot be used flexibly for spatial orientation in mental rotation tasks, compared to colored end cubes. Thus, embodiment appears to be a strong and inflexible mechanism that may, under certain conditions, even impede performance.

Young infants infer a second object if shown an object apparently moving on a discontinuous path (Aguiar & Baillargeon, 2002; Spelke, Kestenbaum, Simons, & Wein, 1995). In three experiments, we examined whether children aged 3–6 years and adults would do the same in their verbal explanations of an apparent continuity violation. Presenting participants with video clips (Exp. 1 and 3) as well as live events (Exp. 2) of a toy locomotive apparently passing through a tunnel without appearing in a large opening in the middle, we found virtually no evidence for generations of two-object explanations of the critical test event in preschoolers. Some of the younger children even denied a continuity violation at first. When participants were familiarized to two identical objects instead of just one, they were more likely to realize that a second object was involved in the test events but, unlike adults (Exp. 3), most children nonetheless adhered to a one-object interpretation. Analyzing 3- and 5-year-old children’s and adults’ eye movements (Exp. 3), we found that children’s difficulties to infer a second object from an apparent continuity violation were not caused by inappropriate looking strategies. We conclude that preschoolers’ physical reasoning about the numerical identity of objects is not continuous with the preverbal reasoning of infants. Rather than being exclusively constrained by the output of basic object-individuation processes, as in infants, it is also strongly influenced, in a top-down manner, by prior beliefs.