Re-assessing the evidence for mental rotation abilities in children using computational models
This challenges existing theories in developmental psychology by suggesting that evidence for mental rotation in young children might be misinterpreted, potentially impacting research on cognitive development.
The study re-evaluated evidence for mental rotation abilities in children using computational models of object recognition, finding that such abilities may not be present before age 5, as a simple pixel-wise comparison strategy could replicate results from classical tasks.
There is strong and diverse evidence for mental rotation (MR) abilities in adults. However, current evidence for MR in children rests on just a few behavioral paradigms adapted from the adult literature. Here, we leverage recent computational models of the development of children's object recognition abilities to re-assess the evidence for MR in children. The computational models simulate infants' acquisition of object representations during embodied interactions with objects. We consider two different object recognition strategies, different from MRs, and assess their ability to replicate results from three classical MR tasks assigned to children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. Our results show that MR may play no role in producing the results obtained from children younger than 5 years. In fact, we find that a simple recognition strategy that reflects a pixel-wise comparison of stimuli is sufficient to model children's behavior in the most used MR task. Thus, our study reopens the debate on how and when children develop genuine MR abilities.