Ira Puspitawati

Children's spatial analysis of hierarchical patterns: construction and perception.

Two experiments were reported that aimed at investigating the development of spatial analysis of hierarchical patterns in children between 3 and 9 years of age. A total of 108 children participated in the drawing experiment, and 224 children were tested in a force-choice similarity judgment task. In both tasks, participants were exposed to consistent and inconsistent targets for short (300-ms) and long (3-s) durations. The drawing task showed that 3-year-old children either preferred to draw the local level or reproduced both levels in a nonintegrated manner. Coordination between the 2 processes started to emerge at 4 years of age, and 6-year-old children produced essentially correct integrated responses. The similarity judgment task confirmed that local processing dominated at 3 years of age. Preference for global processing appeared at 5 years of age, and it gained in strength later. Significant effects of stimulus consistency and stimulus duration were also found. In particular, the use of inconsistent patterns in the similarity judgment task revealed a phenomenon of local-to-global interference in the 3-year-olds.

How explicit and implicit test instructions in an implicit learning task affect performance.

Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years were exposed to artificial grammar learning. Following an implicit exposure phase, half of the participants received neutral instructions at test while the other half received instructions making a direct, explicit reference to the training phase. We first aimed to assess whether implicit learning operated in the two test conditions. We then evaluated the differential impact of age on learning performances as a function of test instructions. The results showed that performance did not vary as a function of age in the implicit instructions condition, while age effects emerged when explicit instructions were employed at test. However, performance was affected differently by age and the instructions given at test, depending on whether the implicit learning of short or long units was assessed. These results suggest that the claim that the implicit learning process is independent of age needs to be revised.

Local and Global Processing in Blind and Sighted Children in a Naming and Drawing Task

This study investigated the spatial analysis of tactile hierarchical patterns in 110 early-blind children aged 6-8 to 16-18 years, as compared to 90 blindfolded sighted children, in a naming and haptic drawing task. The results revealed that regardless of visual status, young children predominantly produced local responses in both tasks, whereas the production of integrated responses emerged later. Development of local and global processing seems to proceed similarly in the two populations, but local processing continued to occur at high levels over a larger age range in the blind. The possibility of visual mediation is pointed out, as totally blind children tended to process information locally more often than blind children with minimal light perception.