The Comparative Study Of Visual Spatial Imagery Between Moderate To Severe Mentally Retarded Children And Normal Children

Visual spatial imagery is imagery of spatial relationships. The simple example is that if I ask you to imagine the room in which you spend most of your time. If you produce a picture of this in your mind, it is spatial imagery. The Cognitive psychologists prove that children use more imagery in the process of thinking than adults do though a large number of studies.The ability of Children’s visual spatial imagery is an important index of children’s spatial ability and cognitive development.In many researches about childre’s imagery ability, researches on visual spatial imagery ability have always been the most important content. Visual spatial imagery ability is not only the core of spatial intelligence, but also has a large degree of vividness, diversity and flexibility. It is the main material of children’s imagination and one of the main contents of the children’s understanding.Children with moderate to severe mental retardation are special groups of children. Their intellectual development is significantly lower than that of normal children. Visual spatial imagery ability is a part of intelligence, so the development of visual spatial imagery has also been affected. At home and abroad, there are lots of researches on normal children’s spatial imagery, but the moderate and severe mentally retarded children are rarely involved.This study choose to conduct a comaparative study between moderate to severe mentally retarded children and normal children, hopely to further study spatial cognitive ability of children with mental retardation. At the same time, the study provides a pathological basis for the development of the whole children’s spacial cognitive ability, making the the research better.Around this goal, I conducted two experiments:Experiment one, Sanshan experiment. The experiment is to test the developmental level of children’s visual spatial imagery through children’s identification of relative spatial position.Experiment two, mental rotation test. The experiment is to test the developmental level of children’s visual spatial imagery through children’s psychological operations of spatial objects.This study is to reveal the regularity of development of visual spatial imagery between two kinds of children.The experimental results show that:(1) Intellengence plays an important role in the development of children’s visual spatial imagery.Children with moderate to severe mental retardation not only grows slowlier than that of normal children,but also grows much lower than that of normal children.(2) Moderate and severe mentally retarded children and normal children both have their critical period. The development speed of normal children’s visual spatial imagery in the period of8-9years is very fast, but children with moderate to severe mentally retardation develop the ability of visual spatial imagery after the age of14.(3) The sanshan experiment and mental rotation experiment can both reflect the development of children’s visual spatial imagery. The development of children’s visual spatial imagery ability in mental rotation is late at the age than the development of visual spatial imagery ability in spatial n discrimination.Finally, the limitations of the present research were discussed; the future directions, theoretical implications and practical value of this paper were provided.