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Schutte, Anne R. and Spencer, John P. 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7320-144X
(2002)
Generalizing the dynamic field theory of the A-not-B error beyond infancy: Three-year-olds' delay- and experience-dependent location memory biases.
Child Development, 73 (2).
pp. 377-404.
ISSN 0009-3920
Abstract
Thelen and colleagues recently proposed a dynamic field theory (DFT) to capture the general processes that give rise to infants' performance in the Piagetian A-not-B task. According to this theory, the same general processes should operate in noncanonical A-not-B-type tasks with children older than 12 months. Three predictions of the DFT were tested by examining 3-year-olds' location memory errors in a task with a homogeneous task space. Children pointed to remembered locations after delays of 0 s to 10 s. The spatial layout of the possible targets and the frequency with which children moved to each target was varied. As predicted by the DFT, children's responses showed a continuous spatial drift during delays toward a longer term memory of previously moved-to locations. Furthermore, these delay-dependent effects were reduced when children moved to an "A" location on successive trials, and were magnified on the first trial to a nearby "B" location. Thus, the DFT generalized to capture the performance of 3-year-old children in a new task. In contrast to predictions of the DFT, however, 3-year-olds' responses were also biased toward the midline of the task space - an effect predicted by the category adjustment (CA) model. These data suggest that young children's spatial memory responses are affected by delay- and experience-dependent processes as well as the geometric structure of the task space. Consequently, two current models of spatial memory - the DFT and the CA model - provide incomplete accounts of children's location memory abilities.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | Pure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 13 Nov 2015 17:02 |
| Last Modified: | 06 Sep 2023 14:30 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/55278 |
| DOI: | 10.1111/1467-8624.00413 |
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