Mental object rotation and motor development in 8- and 10-month-old infants

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Highlights

  • This research investigated 8- and 10-month-olds’ mental rotation abilities.

  • It was not until 10 months of age that infants succeeded.

  • Mental rotation performance was related to motor development.

  • Results emphasize the importance of motor experience for cognitive development.

Abstract

Recent evidence indicates that 6-month-old infants’ mental rotation of objects profits from prior manual experience, whereas observational experience does not have the same beneficial effect. The current study investigated whether older infants, at 8 and 10 months, succeed in a mental rotation task after observational experience only and whether performance is related to infants’ motor development. Using the violation-of-expectation paradigm, infants (N = 40) were presented with an asymmetrical object that was moved straight down behind an occluder. After the occluder was lowered, infants saw either the original object (possible event) or a mirror image of the original object (impossible event) in one of five different orientations (0° to 180° in steps of 45°). Results indicated that it was not until 10 months of age that infants looked longer at the impossible outcome. Analyses including parent questionnaire data showed that mental rotation performance was related to infants’ motor development, emphasizing the importance of action experience for early cognitive development.

Introduction

Mental rotation is a well-examined spatial ability in human adults (e.g., Shepard & Metzler, 1971). One reason for its importance in cognitive research is that evidence for mental rotation has been taken as proof for the existence of depictive mental representations that are analogue to perception (Kosslyn, 1975). For example, findings in mental rotation research have shown that imagined movements reflect the same spatiotemporal characteristics as real movements, suggesting that they are subject to similar physical constraints as movements in the external world (Kosslyn, 1980). A second reason is that tests of mental rotation have often been used as markers for spatial abilities in adults’ ability assessments and intelligence tests (for a review, see Hegarty & Waller, 2005). However, despite the emphasis on mental rotation in adult research, the early origins of this particular ability and its individual differences are still unclear. The current study aimed to further explore the early development of mental rotation abilities during the first year of life as well as the relation between motor development and infants’ cognitive processing of rotational events.

The first studies to systematically investigate infants’ understanding of rotational object movements presented 4- to 8-month-old infants with an object that rotated and moved on a curved trajectory and finally disappeared behind an occluder (Hespos and Rochat, 1997, Rochat and Hespos, 1996). When the occluder was lowered, the object was revealed in an orientation that was either consistent or inconsistent with the continued rotational movement. Results indicated that infants of all age groups looked longer at the inconsistent test event, suggesting that even the youngest infants were able to anticipate the outcome of the event. Recent studies on infants’ mental object rotation presented infants from 3 to 5 months of age with asymmetrical objects in multiple views (Quinn & Liben, 2008) or in motion, revolving through a 240° angle (Moore and Johnson, 2008, Moore and Johnson, 2011). In subsequent test trials, infants’ looking times toward the original object or its mirror image in previously unseen orientations were measured. Results showed that infants discriminated the original object from its mirror image in a novel orientation, suggesting that they mentally rotated the object.

The above studies left unanswered whether seeing the object in multiple views or in a rotational movement is crucial for infants’ understanding of object rotation. This question was addressed by the following two studies. First, Möhring and Frick (2013) demonstrated that 6-month-old infants were able to mentally rotate an object even if they did not see a rotational trajectory before the object was occluded. Infants were presented with an asymmetrical object that was moved straight down behind an occluder. When the occluder was lowered, either the same object (possible event) or its mirror image (impossible event) was revealed in one of five different orientations (varying from 0° to 180° in steps of 45°). Results showed that infants looked longer at the impossible than at the possible outcomes. Importantly, 6-month-olds succeeded in this task only if they had the opportunity to manually explore the test object prior to the experiment. In contrast, same-aged infants who were not allowed to touch the object did not differentiate between test events. In a similar vein but using a different approach, Frick and Wang (in press) demonstrated that 13- and 14-month-old infants were able to mentally track the orientation of an object on a turntable, even though the object was completely hidden during rotation. Again, 13- and 14-month-olds succeeded only after an exploration phase offering the opportunity to gather hands-on experience with the turntable carrying a different object. Taken together, these two studies showed that infants were able to mentally rotate objects even if they were not familiarized with a rotational movement of the test object. Moreover, these findings point to the importance of action experience in the form of direct manual exploration of the test object (Möhring & Frick, 2013) or hands-on training with a turntable and a different object (Frick & Wang, in press). Furthermore, there is recent correlational evidence that 9-month-old infants’ crawling experience is associated with mental rotation performance (Schwarzer, Freitag, Buckel, & Lofruthe, 2013) as measured by a task similar to the one of Moore and Johnson (2008).

These findings are in line with developmental theories positing that cognitive abilities are based on sensorimotor experiences (e.g., Piaget, 1952, Piaget and Inhelder, 1956, Piaget and Inhelder, 1971). The idea of a close linkage between cognition and action, or – in other words – between perceptual and motor systems of the brain, has recently gained new interest in the field of embodied cognition (Wilson, 2002, Zwaan, 1999). In support of this notion, recent evidence suggested that 4-year-olds’ spatial transformation abilities were associated with how often they played with puzzles (Levine, Ratliff, Huttenlocher, & Cannon, 2011). Further studies have shown that motor activities or motor constraints influenced children’s and adults’ mental object rotation (Frick et al., 2009, Funk et al., 2005, Krüger and Krist, 2009). Importantly, these studies point to a stronger influence of action experience in children than in adults, suggesting that the influence of action on cognition may change over the course of development. As they get older, children may become better at translating observed movements into covertly activated (but not executed) action plans (Wilson, 2002). Indeed, recent research showed that by 5 years of age, both manual and observational experience increased accuracy in a mental rotation task (Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013). In the current experiment, we investigated at which age infants would succeed at a mental rotation task after observational experience only. For this purpose, we used the same methodological approach as Möhring and Frick (2013), who showed that 6-month-olds did not succeed after observational experience only, and tested older infants at 8 and 10 months.

Assuming that the ability to learn from observational experience increases with age, this raises the question of what kinds of mechanisms promote this development. A possible scenario is that maturation of infants’ own motor abilities has a positive effect on how much information they can gain through observation. Manipulating objects or moving among them may provide infants with a range of opportunities to view objects in different orientations and from different perspectives. Indeed, previous research provided evidence for a relation between locomotor development and infants’ spatial cognition in general (for a review, see Campos et al., 2000) and mental object rotation in particular (Schwarzer et al., 2013). Therefore, infants’ motor development was assessed by means of a parent questionnaire in the current study.

Section snippets

Participants

The participants were 20 healthy and full-term infants at the mean age of 8 months 2 days (SD = 8 days, range = 7 months 17 days to 8 months 15 days, 10 girls and 10 boys) and 20 infants at the mean age of 10 months 21 days (SD = 20 days, range = 9 months 18 days to 11 months 14 days, 10 girls and 10 boys). For the sake of simplicity, these age groups are subsequently referred to as 8- and 10-month-olds, respectively.

An additional 4 infants were tested but excluded from the sample due to fussiness (2) or failure to

Familiarization

Looking times during the familiarization events were compared using an analysis of variance (ANOVA) with age group as a between-participants variable. No main effect of age group, F(1, 38) = 0.21, p = .65, η2 = .01, and no interaction of age group and familiarization event were observed (F < 1), suggesting that 8- and 10-month-olds did not differ in their looking behavior during familiarization.

Test events

The following results are based on infants’ looking times after the occluder was lowered and the final

Discussion

The current study was based on previous work (Möhring & Frick, 2013) that provided evidence for 6-month-old infants’ mental object rotation after hands-on experience with the test object. Conversely, same-aged infants who received observational information only did not discriminate between possible and impossible test events, suggesting that at this early age action experience is crucial for infants’ mental object rotation. The current findings extend these results in various ways. They showed

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (PZ00P1_131866) to the first author. We thank Nora S. Newcombe for helpful comments on previous versions, Raquel Paz for her help with data collection and coding, Christian Paschke for his help with preparing the stimuli, and Henri Gossweiler for his help with producing the video sequences. Finally, we thank the parents who kindly agreed to have their infants participate in this study.

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    Current address: Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.

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