Correction Of The Module Theory Of Children's Spatial Reorientation

Children's spatial reorientation was the ability of reorienting themselves andfinding the hidden object after disorientation. This ability was similar to that of somenonhuman mammals, all of whom could only reorient in accord with the geometricinformation provided by the spatial environment, but could not reorient in accord withnongeometric information. The theory of geometric model insisted that it was some kind ofgeometric module in the cognition system of children and nonhuman mammals caused thisphenomenon. However, many researches have put forward doubts that this viewpoint wastoo simple. It was discovered that under certain conditions, children could reorient withnongeometric information. However, none has concluded the commonness of thenongeometric information which children could use for reorientation so far. As a result, wewould try to solve this problem, and correct the module theory of children's spatialreorientation based on our experiment results.In this research, we made some improvement of research module. Firstly, weused between-subject experiment design, as within-subject design sometimes would makethe subjects guess the properties of the nongeometric information; Secondly, ourexperiments were based on different nongeometric information. Some researches hadproved that the extrusion of information is one of the important influent factors for childrento use nongeometric information or not. At the same time, fixity of nongeometricinformation is another main point. And what's more, according to the definition of the module theory, nongeometric information is all the information in the environment exceptthe geometric shape of the whole environment. As a result, we would try to find out whatkind of nongeometric information are the ones children could use for reorientation by usingdifferent nongeometric information, and then we would conclude the commonness of thosenongeometric information, which would give evidence to the correction of the moduletheory.In experiment 1, we first repeated the experiment of using blue wall, in order toexplore whether Chinese children were different from foreigner children in usingnongemetric information. Based on the result that there was no culture difference, we useda blue square, which had both color and shape to explore children's reorientation. Theresult of using the blue square showed thai: the addition of shape was useless to children'sreorientation, children could not use it either.In experiment 2, in order to make the nongemetric information more obvious, wechanged the blue square for a more colorful fruit picture, which is immobile usually inchildren's eyes. The result showed that most of the children could not use the fruit picturefor reorientation. However, many researches have found that children can reorient withnongeometric information when there were two or more fixed landmarks. And in ourexperiment, although we used immobile landmark, the singleness and lack of comparisonmade it useless for children to reorient. Based on this viewpoint, we showed children twodifferent picture, adding a beautiful cartoon picture to the single fruit picture to test thesame task again. And it was surprising that in such a condition, children could use them toreorient.The results of this research are as follows:1. The module theory of children's spatial reorientation has limitation, there is no"encapsulated system".2. Geometric information is the preferred information that children can use for reorientation,but under certain conditions, children can also use nogeometric information.3. Nongeometric information that can be used for children's reorientation has followcharacters: first, it is based on ecological validity of the environment; second, it has thecharacters of intensity, fixity and comparability.