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Using Eye-tracking to Understand the Complex Relations Between Attention and Language in Children's Spatial Skill Development

出版	University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2018
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=_0V80AEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋This dissertation investigated relations between visual attention and language as these factors relate to spatial skill development. It used eye-tracking to differentiate among hypotheses regarding whether: language causes changes in spatial cognition unrelated to changes in visual attention; language and visual attention both facilitate spatial performance but through different mechanisms; or language only relates to spatial performance in that it is a useful cue in directing visual attention? Four- to five-year-old children participated in two spatial recall tasks assessing their use of an intrinsic reference frame during recall (memory for relations among nearby objects). The task involved children finding a toy's location under a cup on an array of cups and landmarks after a 5 second delay and the array rotated. Children first participated in the baseline recall task receiving non-specific cues. Then children participated in the recall task again under conditions of verbal, visual, or no-specific cues (control). Consistent with past research, the results showed that the verbal cues were most effective in supporting spatial performance. Additionally the results showed that children's visual attention can be directed to support their spatial performance. Effects of verbal cues were partially mediated by children's visual attention; but verbal cues supported children's performance more than by simply directing their visual attention. This is the first known study to directly measure children's visual attention to predict their spatial performance. These results provide compelling support for a weak verbal encoding hypothesis that both language and visual attention support young children's spatial performance.