Toddlers' Problem Solving: The Importance of Dynamic Integration

Toddlers’ Problem Solving: The Importance of Spatial Integration Lori J. Gresham (greshalj@email.uc.edu) University of Cincinnati, Department of Psychology, 409A Dyer Hall, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0376, USA Heidi Kloos (heidi.kloos@uc.edu) University of Cincinnati, Department of Psychology, 409A Dyer Hall, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0376, USA Such performance discrepancy between violation-to- expectation tasks and search task has hampered the enthusiasm for approaches that postulate core knowledge (cf., Haith, 1998). How can we claim the existence of core knowledge if children show evidence for such knowledge in some contexts, but not in other contexts? The current study takes a different approach. Rather than worrying about whether children do or do not know something about a certain concept, we look at general principles of learning: What in the immediate context helps children perform well, and what hinders successful performance? For example, what helps children attend to violations of the solidity principle in a looking task but not in a search task? Our assumption is that children attempt to link pieces of information into a larger whole, even when it leads to mistakes (cf., Kloos, 2007). For example, if two separate objects move in synchrony back and forth, infants will perceive them to be part of one unified object (e.g., Kellman & Spelke, 1983; Johnson, 2001). Children are likely to link the top and the bottom object into a connected unit. Importantly, such integration may be affected by the spatial distance between events – at least for young toddlers: closer-together events may be more easily integrated than events that are farther apart. Imagine, for example, a ball moving across the diagonal of a plane, say from a front corner to the back corner of a room. For adults, the perception of whether the ball rolls to the back corner of the room, or, instead rises to the top corner of the room is affected by the motion of its shadow (Kersten, Mamassian, Krill, 1997). If the shadow stays in close proximity of the ball, we perceive the ball to move on the floor. But if the shadow moves away from the ball, we perceive the ball to rise to the top. Four-year-olds are affected by the same visual illusion (Kloos, Srivorakiat, Odar, Cummins-Sebree & Shockley, 2007). However, 3-year-olds cannot integrate shadow and ball if the shadow moves away from the ball. They are only able to successfully integrate the proximal cue, but not the more distal cue (Kloos et al., 2007). In addition to being a relevant factor for perception, is spatial proximity a relevant factor in young children’s problem solving? The current study seeks to answer this Abstract While young infants appear competent in some task contexts, older toddlers often show difficulty with the same concepts. They apparently fail to understand something that infants are competent of. Such discrepancy in performance is puzzling, but only if task performance is taken to reflect knowledge or competency. The current study makes a different assumption: Namely that task performance reflects the immediate constraints of the task. We hypothesize that low performance in a conceptually ‘easy’ task comes from a difficulty with spatially integrating relevant pieces of information. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated the degree of necessary spatial integration in a task that was originally taken to demonstrate toddlers’ difficulty with the concept of object solidity. Indeed, toddlers performed better when task constraints were present that minimized the degree to which spatial integration was required. The results point to an important problem in research that seeks to isolate a child’s knowledge. Keywords: toddlers; solidity; constraints; Introduction Even the youngest of infants seem to know something about the physical world, about causal relations, about theory of mind, and about the workings of a language (e.g., see Bremner & Fogel, 2001 for a review). Take for example, performance in a physics task. Four-month-olds not only formulate expectations about moving objects that disappear from view (e.g., Baillargeon, 1986), they act surprised when one solid object apparently moves through another (Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992). Surprisingly however, toddlers fail to draw upon this knowledge in a search task, though it appears to emerge during infancy. For example, when asked to search for a ball that has rolled behind a screen, toddlers cannot use the principle of solidity to search for the ball. They are told on repeatedly that the ball stops at the barrier, and their attention is drawn to the portion of the barrier visible above the screen. Yet, children under 3 years of age fail to search for the ball at the barrier. Instead, they engage in a guessing game, completely ignoring the cue of the barrier provided to them.