Generalizing the dynamic field theory of the A-not-B error beyond infancy: three-year-olds' delay- and experience-dependent location memory biases.

Full 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.

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Author information

Author/s: Schutte, Anne R (AR); Spencer, John P (JP);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City 52242, USA. anne-schutte@uiowa.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Clinical Trial; Journal Article; Randomized Controlled Trial

Journal: Child development (Child Dev), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: -2002 Mar-Apr; vol 73 (issue 2) : pp 377-404

Dates: Created 2002/04/12; Completed 2002/10/24; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 11949898, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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