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Dive into the research topics where Mark Blades is active.

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Featured researches published by Mark Blades.


British Journal of Development Psychology | 2000

Do children try to answer nonsensical questions

Amanda H. Waterman; Mark Blades; Christopher Spencer

Previous researchers found that young children will try to answer nonsensical questions. In Expt 1, 5- to 8-year-olds were asked sensible and nonsensical questions. Half of each type were ‘closed’ questions (which required a yes/no response), and half were ‘open’ questions (which could be answered in several ways). Three weeks later the same children were asked to judge if the questions were sensible or silly. Children answered all the sensible questions appropriately, and only attempted to answer a small proportion of the nonsensical open questions. However, they did try to answer three-quarters of the nonsensical closed questions. Nonetheless, children were nearly always correct in judging which questions were sensible and which were nonsensical. In Expt 1 all the closed nonsensical questions were also ones that required a comparison between two items. In Expt 2 we compared childrens responses to nonsensical open and closed questions when half of each type were comparative and half were non-comparative. Children attempted to answer nonsensical closed questions irrespective of whether or not they included a comparison. However, few children attempted to answer nonsensical open questions. We discuss the implications of these results for questioning children and in the context of childrens eyewitness testimony.


Archive | 2004

Advertising to children on TV : content, impact, and regulation

Barrie Gunter; Caroline Oates; Mark Blades

Contents: Preface. The Issues About Television Advertising to Children. The Nature of Advertising to Children. Childrens Early Understanding of Television Advertisements. Advanced Understanding of Advertising. Theoretical Approaches to Studying Childrens Understanding of Advertisements. Advertising Impact: Knowledge, Attitudes, and Values. Advertising Influence: Choice and Consumption. The Incidental Influence of Advertising. Advertising Regulation and Research. Concluding Comments.


Progress in Human Geography | 1997

Understanding spatial concepts at the geographic scale without the use of vision

Rob Kitchin; Mark Blades; Reginald G. Golledge

In this article we review the literature that has sought to determine the spatial understanding of people with visual impairments or blindness. In particular, we examine the arguments surrounding whether people with visual impairments or blindness can understand geographic relationships such as distance, configuration and hierarchy. At present, the conclusions of researchers can be divided into three camps. One group suggests that vision is the spatial sense par excellence. This group suggests that congenitally blind individuals (blind from birth) are incapable of spatial thought because they have never experienced the perceptual processes (e.g., vision) necessary to comprehend spatial arrangements. Another group suggests that people with visual impairments can understand and mentally manipulate spatial concepts, but because information is based upon auditory and haptic cues this knowledge and comprehension is inferior to that based upon vision. The third group suggests that visually impaired individuals possess the same abilities to process and understand spatial concepts and that any differences, either in quantitative or qualitative terms, can be explained by intervening variables such as access to information, experience or stress. To date, most of the research which has led to these conclusions has been conducted using small-scale, laboratory environments and, as yet, we are still unsure as to how people with visual impairments and blindness learn, store and process spatial information at the geographic scale. We suggest that more research is needed to understand more fully the ‘mental landscapes’ of people with blindness or visual impairments. Such research is necessary, particularly given the rapid growth of orientation and navigation aids in recent years aimed at increasing independent mobility. However, research must move out of the laboratory to examine spatial thought within the geographic environments that people with visual impairments or blindness interact with on a daily basis.


Archive | 1996

The Construction of Cognitive Maps by Children with Visual Impairments

Simon Ungar; Mark Blades; Christopher Spencer

The way in which children who have visual impairments construct cognitive maps of their environment is of considerable theoretical and practical importance. It sheds light on the role of sensory experience in the development of spatial cognition which can in turn suggest how spatial skills might be nurtured in visually impaired children. In most of the studies reviewed here, groups of children who lost their sight early in life perform less well on a variety of spatial tasks than sighted children or children who lost their sight later in life. We will argue that it is not the lack of visual experience in itself which produces this pattern, but rather the effect of lack of vision on the spatial coding strategies adopted by the children. Finally we will discuss a number of methods for encouraging visually impaired children to use coding systems which are appropriate for the construction of flexible and integrated cognitive maps, with particular reference to the use of tactile maps.


Annals of The Association of American Geographers | 2003

Mapping as a Cultural and Cognitive Universal

J. M. Blaut; David Stea; Christopher Spencer; Mark Blades

Abstract We hypothesize that nearly all humans, in all cultures, acquire the ability to read and use map-like models in very early childhood, and that this ability is a fundamental part of human ecological adaptation, comparable in many ways to tool use. Evidence pertaining to this theory should be sought in three kinds of research: studies in differing cultures of the development of young childrens ability to use map-like models; studies probing for evidence of map-like modeling across the ethnographic spectrum; and studies probing for evidence of the use of map-like models in prehistory. We are pursuing all three lines of research. However, our main focus thus far has been on the developmental dimension of the problem. Here, we report evidence that supports the universality hypothesis from seven empirical studies carried out on mapping abilities of three- to five-year-old children in several Western and non-Western cultures; we offer a general ecological theory of the development of mapping abilities, a theory that appears to explain the evidence elicited and accords with the universality hypothesis; and we discuss the implications of this work for early childhood education.


British Journal of Development Psychology | 2003

Recognizing people from the inner or outer parts of their faces: developmental data concerning 'unfamiliar' faces

Stephen C. Want; Olivier Pascalis; Mike Coleman; Mark Blades

Existing data demonstrate a developmental trend in the way in which highly familiar faces are recognized, such that young children rely more on the outer facial features (the hairline, chin and ears) than the inner facial features (the eyes, nose and mouth) and adults demonstrate the reverse pattern. However, little is known about the developmental pattern of importance of inner and outer facial features for recognizing people who are not highly familiar. Here we report a study which attempts to describe this pattern. Using a two-alternative forced-choice procedure, we presented 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds and adults (N = 22 in each group) with the task of recognizing an experimentally familiarized face (initially seen in a short video) from a still picture of either the whole face, just the inner, or just the outer parts. The results showed that, for all ages, recognition was faster (and in most cases, more accurate) for outer features alone than for inner features alone (and was fastest for whole faces). These data demonstrate the importance of outer facial features for the recognition of relatively unfamiliar faces. Taken together with previous findings, they enhance our picture of the effects of age and experience with individual faces on recognition and configural processing.


Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders | 1998

Source Monitoring by Children with Autism.

Annette Farrant; Mark Blades; Jill Boucher

The term “source monitoring” refers to the ability to distinguish the origins of memories. One type of source monitoring is reality monitoring—which means distinguishing internally and externally generated memories. This experiment examined reality monitoring by children with autism (with a mean mental age of 7 years 8 months). The children said several words and listened to another person say similar words. The children were then given a surprise memory test and asked to identify which words they had said and which the other person had said. The children with autism were compared to matched groups of normal children and children with mental retardation. There were no differences between the groups and, at least for this task, there was no evidence that children with autism have a deficit in their reality monitoring abilities.


Journal of Genetic Psychology | 1994

Young children's ability to understand a model as a spatial representation.

Mark Blades; Zana Cooke

Childrens ability to understand that a real environment can be represented in a symbolic form (i.e., by a model) is an important developmental achievement. Researchers have claimed that children who are just 3 years of age appreciate models as representations. This research was based on tasks that involved having young children use a model to locate a hiding place in an actual room. In this article, however, we point out the difficulties in interpreting previous model tasks, and we describe two studies that showed that young 3-year-olds could perform model tasks successfully when the hiding place they were looking for was a unique place in the model (and room). When the hiding place was unique, the children had to note only that place and they needed no further knowledge about the relationship between the model and the room. When the hiding place was one of two identical places, however, the children needed to take spatial relationships into account to distinguish the correct place, and young 3-year-olds were unable to do this. Four-year-olds were able to use spatial relationships to distinguish identical places when the model was aligned with the space it represented, but they had difficulty when the model was not aligned. Five-year-olds could use spatial relationships effectively between one model space and another whether or not the model was aligned.


Journal of Environmental Psychology | 1992

Developmental differences in the ability to give route directions from a map

Mark Blades; ise Medlicott

Abstract The ability to give accurate route directions is an important way of expressing environmental information, but the development of this ability has received little attention, therefore an experiment was designed to assess how children and adults gave route directions from a map. In an extension of a previous, small scale, experiment ( Brewster & Blades, 1989 Journal of Environmental Education and Information, 8, 141–156). Four groups of children (aged 6, 8, 10, and 12 years) and one group of adults described two routes from maps and the route descriptions were assessed for both their accuracy and content. The six and eight year olds were unable to give correct route directions, but a few of the ten year olds and many of the 12 year old children were able to provide directions for most of the route, and all the adults gave accurate route descriptions from the maps. Analyses were carried out on the content of the descriptions, the effect of the presence of landmarks at turns on the route, and the effects of direction of travel when approaching turns. The main finding was a major developmental contrast in the style and content of the descriptions: the younger children relied predominantly on landmarks and vague indications of direction; the older children and adults included information about the type of road junction at the turn and about the road sequence (e.g. ‘first left’, ‘second right’). The implications of the results for further research are discussed.


Perception | 1995

Mental Rotation of a Tactile Layout by Young Visually Impaired Children

Simon Ungar; Mark Blades; Christopher Spencer

Mental rotation tasks have been used to probe the mental imagery both of sighted and of visually impaired people. People who have been blind since birth display a response pattern which is qualitatively similar to that of sighted people but tend to respond more slowly or with a higher error rate. It has been suggested that visually impaired people code the stimulus and its (or their own) motion in a different way from sighted people—in particular, congenitally blind people may ignore the external reference framework provided by the stimulus and surrounding objects, and instead use body-centred or movement-based coding systems. What has not been considered before is the relationship between different strategies for tactually exploring the stimulus and the response pattern of congenitally blind participants. Congenitally blind and partially sighted children were tested for their ability to learn and recall a layout of tactile symbols. Children explored layouts of one, three, or five shapes which they then attempted to reproduce. On half the trials there was a short pause between exploring and reproducing the layouts. In an aligned condition children reproduced the array from the same position at which they had explored it; in a rotated condition children were asked to move 90° round the table between exploring and reproducing the layout. Both congenitally blind and partially sighted children were less accurate in the rotated condition than in the aligned condition. Five distinct strategies used by the children in learning the layout were identified. These strategies interacted with both visual status and age. We suggest that the use of strategies, rather than visual status or chronological age, accounts for differences in performance between children.

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Simon Ungar

University of Sheffield

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