The Development of Spatial Cognition

Robert Cohen, Robert Cohen

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134926732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

First published in 1985. The present book represents a statement of the state of the art in a very important aspect of spatial cognition, its development.

I

INTRODUCTION

1

What’s So Special About Spatial Cognition?

Robert Cohen

Memphis State University

Allow me to begin with a personal anecdote that has occurred with some frequency. I’ll be at a social gathering and be introduced to a real person (i.e., nonprofessional, nonscientist). Inevitably I will be asked, “And what is your occupation?” To which I reply, “Oh, I’m a psychologist.”

“I’m sure that’s very interesting,” he or she says while backing away and scanning the room for someone else to engage in conversation.

“But really I’m a child psychologist,” I hasten to add.

“Oh,” the person perks up, “my kid has been sticking peas in his ears quite regularly, and I was wondering if. …”

“Actually, I’m a research psychologist.”

“How interesting!” says my new friend, now completely at ease. “And what do you research?”

Now of course, I’m interested. “I study spatial cognition in children!”

As puzzlement begins to cloud my listener’s face, I then get the question that indirectly formed the concept of this chapter. “What’s special cognition?”

This question may be due to an unknown speech impediment on my part, or it may be due to my residing in the South and there being a confusion in dialect. Most likely, however, the layman is unfamiliar with the domain addressed in this book, as in fact I would guess are many social scientists.

The philosophical roots of spatial cognition, of course, are quite old, dating back at least to the rationalism-empiricism debate of Plato and Aristotle. Research interests in the field can be traced to the early part of this century with the research on human factors, to more recently the interest of psychologists, educators, architects, city planners, and others in the impact of physical setting on behavior. It is not my purpose here to provide a detailed history of the field. The reader is directed to Liben, Patterson, and Newcombe (1981), Hart and Moore (1973), and Siegel and White (1975) for excellent accounts. I would like to direct your attention in the present chapter to what I feel is an important issue for researchers and consumers of this field: What constitute the dimensions of inquiry for spatial cognition? Following this discussion, I briefly outline the chapters of the book.

A THEORETICAL NICHE FOR SPATIAL COGNITION

While many researchers continue to focus on experimental independent variables that either deny or ignore the importance of environmental factors, there are several contemporary theories that emphasize the role of context as an influence on behavior. Following is a brief review of some of these theories with an eye toward ferreting out and elaborating the role of spatial cognition.

SOME GENERAL THEORIES OF WHICH SPATIAL COGNITION IS A PART

Ittelson, Proshansky, Rivlin, and Winkel (1974) and others have been leaders in what has been termed “Environmental Psychology.” Although I find a formal definition of this field to be somewhat elusive, Ittelson et al. offer some general parameters. Environmental psychology is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding person-environment transactions. Environmental psychologists are interested primarily in field research, viewing people in context, to understand the dynamic interchange between people and settings. Many of them have become interested in social problems that stem from environmental concerns such as crises of urban living and pollution.

Many of the statements in the preceding paragraph may remind the reader of the research on human factors or human engineering, but the perspective of the contemporary environmental psychologist is considerably wider. The environment is broadly conceived of as a total constellation rather than as a set of easily separable elements. A person, as part of that constellation, influences and is influenced by the setting. Thus, it is at best inappropriate to separate out for analysis the physical from the social aspects of any environmental setting. While focusing on social and cultural factors, the environmental psychologist also considers more circumspect person factors. How an individual experiences the world (perception) and how an individual understands the world (cognition) are considered as integral to the dynamic interplay of person and environment.

The work by Roger Barker (e.g., 1968), which has resurfaced in recent years with a new fervor, perhaps best exemplifies a concern for the role of physical setting. The environment is not simply a stage or setting for behavior; rather behavior and physical context exist in a synomorphic relationship. Each contributes to the structure and organization of the other. Yet the laws that govern the impact of the physical setting are different from the laws that govern the behavior in those settings. This implies that the behaviors that can exist in a setting together with the nonbehavioral components of the setting exist independently of any particular person or set of people. As support for this notion, Barker observed that interindividual variations in behavior within a setting are often less than intraindividual variations in behavior across settings.

This is not to deny the existence of individual differences in behavior. Psychological, physiological, and learning factors play a role in how an individual will behave in any setting at any point in time. But the variations themselves will follow a form dictated by the structure of the setting. To use an example we’ve used elsewhere (Cohen, Poag, & Goodnight, 1982), some children may perceive the classroom as a success arena, whereas others may view it as a scene of frustration and failure. Though the first set of children will arrive on time, be attentive, and participate, the latter may be tardy, inattentive, and disruptive. The point to be made is that all these are “classroom behaviors,” albeit some are valued by observers and others are not. Thus the behavior of an individual will be influenced by the structure of a setting, the structure of behavior, and the physical and interpersonal dynamics of people in settings.

While Barker places primary emphasis on physical context, some theorists focus on the social contexts of behavior. Bandura’s (1977) contemporary rendition of social learning theory includes the concept of reciprocal determinism in this regard. According to Bandura, behavior, environment, and personal characteristics are interdependent factors. Personal characteristics are primarily defined in cognitive terms such as expectancies, self-efficacy, attentional processes, and so forth. There is some mention of the impact of physical setting, but the role of environment is mainly as an arena where others put behaviors on display for the observational learning of the individual. Thus, like Barker, Bandura believes that behavior is best understood in its relationship to the context in which it is produced. Barker emphasizes the setting, whereas Bandura emphasizes the social learning abilities of the person and the opportunities for observational learning from others in the environment.

Bronfenbrenner (1979) offers a significantly more comprehensive view of the impact of social settings. An individual is embedded within a series of social systems that differ in the degree of directness of impact they have. The most direct level is termed the microsystem. This includes those systems that the person directly experiences, such as the social interactions a child has with parents at home or with peers at school. The next level, mesosystem, refers to the sets of interactions that occur among microsystems. An example here would be a parent-teacher conference. The child has direct access, and is influenced directly by both parents and teacher, and is somewhat less directly influenced by the conference between the two. The child has an even more indirect relationship with the exosystem, or third level, proposed by Bronfenbrenner. Exosystem interactions involve those interactions that the child has no access to but nevertheless affect him or her. Parents’ occupations are examples of this influence. Finally, at the broadest (and thus most indirect level), macrosystem influences are cultural (or subcultural) ideologies which play a role in an individual’s life.

The implications of Bronfenbrenner’s approach are quite far-reaching. Appropriate research becomes defined not as simply doing naturalistic observations (which is sometimes attributed to him) but rather as analyzing and controlling a variety of spheres of influence to assess certain kinds of developmental change. From my perspective, the strength of Bronfenbrenner’s position is his explicit and detailed, yet comprehensive groundwork for the analysis of behavior and for development. I also see two weaknesses, both of which can be easily remedied without disruption of the theory. First, I am not as willing as Bronfenbrenner to downplay the role of internal factors such as cognition in favor of interpersonal interactions. Henggeler’s (1982) family-ecological systems approach to clinical psychology also noted this shortcoming and incorporated a “mini-microsystem” level of analysis. A second shortcoming, in my opinion, is that Bronfenbrenner gives very little importance to the role of physical setting. Certainly the physical context of behavior at each level of the various systems will play an important role in behavior and in development, from urban versus rural housing for the microsystem, to agrarian versus industrial settings for the macrosystem.

Ittelson et al., Barker, Bandura, and Bronfenbrenner all share an appreciation for the complexity of factors influencing human behavior. They differ in the scope of what they choose to focus on and emphasize. Although integrating their theories into a comprehensive conceptualization would be difficult, they nevertheless offer us some important general dimensions of context (both physical and social) with which to analyze behavior in general and spatial cognition in particular. To make this analysis more comprehensible, I first discuss some current theories that deal more explicitly with spatial cognition.

SOME THEORIES OF SPATIAL COGNITION

Piaget and Inhelder (1967) proposed that the child’s understanding of spatial relations develops in concert with the general stages of cognitive development. A preoperational child understands space in terms of topological relations, or qualitative factors such as “next to” or “in front of.” The concrete operational child, being able to coordinate and seriate objects, understands projective properties of space. That is, this child recognizes that different views of the arrangement of space will accompany different viewing positions of the space. Finally, as a late concrete operational, early formal operational accomplishment, the individual comes to understand Euclidean or metric properties of space. Not only do objects in space order themselves along the dimensions of space, there is a precise measurement or fixed coordinate system that can exactly define the position of an object.

As an important extension and clarification of Piaget’s work, Pick and Lockman (1981) view the development of spatial behaviors in relation to the concept of frames of reference. For these authors, a frame of reference refers to the cue(s) used to define the position of objects in space. For example, objects may be defined egocentrically (i.e., using one’s body as the major reference point), or objects may be defined allocentrically (i.e., using reference points external to the person, such as landmarks, container cues, or geographical coordinates). Although the use of frames of reference follows the progression of body-body, body-object, to object-object relations (i.e., primarily egocentric to primarily allocentric), Pick and Lockman note that mastery and complexity of all three types continue to increase throughout development. In addition, it is overly simplistic to consider any but a very few spatial tasks as involving a single frame of reference. More often it is the case that multiple frames of reference must be coordinated.

As an example of a frames of reference analysis, Pick and Lockman (1981) considered body-object and object-object relations for the spatial behaviors of object manipulation and locomotion in infants and young children. They suggested that body-object relations are mastered first for both activities (i.e., the baby can place his or her hand in a box prior to placing objects in other objects; young children can successfully reverse a traveled route prior to making inferences about the location of objects not directly linked by the route). These data are explained as a reliance by the infant and young child on an egocentric frame of reference. It is easier for the child to orient and manipulate objects and locations in space in reference to self than in reference to the other objects/locations. Efficiency is gained by using external loci; with development, the individual is able to perform more sophisticated orientation with the move to allocentric (object-object) reference systems.

Perhaps more than any other publication, Siegel and White (1975) encouraged investigators to examine spatial cognition in large-scale environments. The issue of scale of the environment is related to, but distinct from, the issue of the size of the space. Large-scale spaces surround the individual and require a coordination of multiple views in order to comprehend the structure in its entirety. Siegel and White suggested that the ability to operate within these complex spaces implies the existence of spatial representations. Individuals must have some mental code of the physical world in order to understand, move about, and interact within the world. They further proposed that the development of these spatial representations follows a particular course. This sequence is followed ontogenetically by children mastering spatial relations, and microgenetically by adults learning a new environment.

First, the individual encodes landmarks-in-context. Landmarks are primarily visual configurations of meaningful, route-orienting objects. Thus, a corner grocery, an intersection, or an old maple tree can serve as landmarks. Next, the individual learns sensorimotor routines connecting landmarks, called routes. Landmarks and routes are the organizing features of spatial representations. As the route knowledge of the person becomes more detailed and enriched, eventually a survey representation of part or all of the space is believed to exist. A survey representation offers comprehensive knowledge of the relationship of landmarks and routes. Presented with the problem of a detour, the individual with survey knowledge can deduce an alternative, never experienced, novel route.

Siegel and White’s theory of the development of large-scale spatial cognition set the stage for much of the current research on spatial cognition. Issues of relevance from this work that have provoked investigators are the externalization of these covert representations, the impact of different environmental structures, and the role of a variety of acquisition experiences, to name a few.

The proliferation of research on spatial representations has not been without its growing pains. A common issue of debate has been different interpretations concerning the development of spatial competence as a function of using different spatial tasks for externalizing the representation. This also raises the issue of the link between one’s covert representation and behavior presumably based upon that representation. Liben (1981) suggested that much of the controversy may be due to a definitional discrepancy. Specifically, researchers of spatial representations may mean different things in their use of the term. As a means of resolving (or at least clarifying) this point, she makes the case quite nicely that there are three types of spatial representations being talked about: spatial products, spatial thought, and spatial storage. Spatial products refer to the concrete outcome of a spatial task such as a map or a verbal description. We know that children’s performance will vary as a function of the medium used to externalize the representation. These production factors take on increased importance to the extent that one proposes that the ability to use particular media is inherent to the individual’s representational ability.

Liben suggested that much of the confusion in the research literature can be understood by the distinction between spatial thought and spatial storage. Spatial thought refers to any cognitive event that involves spatial information being processed by the individual. Remembering a route or being able to mentally rotate an object for comparison with another are examples of spatial thought. Spatial storage is that body of information about space and spatial relations which an individual has but is not conscious of. By way of analogy Liben points to the work by many linguists who propose elaborate rules that native speakers must follow in order to be competent speakers. These rules are a way of characterizing what the speaker can do and in fact can be used to understand how people speak and understand language. Yet the rules exist explicitly in the head of the linguist, not in the head of the native speaker. If an individual becomes aware of the information in spatial storage, Liben suggests this knowledge then falls within the realm of spatial thought.

This conceptualization clarifies some perplexing issues involved with spatial representations. Although inferences about spatial storage can be made from particular behaviors, inferences about spatial thought require the use of several tasks and convergent findings. Thus, to quote Liben, “Positions that appear to be different with respect to methodologies or with respect to the hypothesized link between representation and action appear to...