The Influence Of Spatial Reference System On Contextual Cueing Effect Of Adults And 7-11 Years Old Children

Repeated exposure to the same arrangements of search displays facilitates reaction time(RT)performance,an effect that has been referred to as contextual cueing effect.Using contextual cueing paradigm,the study aimed to examine the impact of spatial reference frames on the contextual cueing effect of adults and children of 7-11 years old.The study 1 aimed to explore whether the adults can use this information to perform a flexible spatial representation when providing obvious environmental reference information.First,the participants implicitly learned the scenes,and then the scenes were rotated to a new viewpoint to determine whether the previously learned contextual cueing effect can be maintained.The two main variables were context(new,old displays),epoch(learning phase 1-6,testing phase 7-8)both manipulated within-subjects.The results showed that:in learning phase,significant contextual cueing was found;after rotating the scenes,the contextual cueing effect in test phase Ⅰ and Ⅱ were both comparable to learning phase Ⅱ.The study 2 further explored the development characteristics of the selection of implicit spatial memory reference frames for 7-11 years old children.The three main variables were context(new,old displays),epoch(learning phase 1-6,testing phase 7-8)and age(7,9,11),context and epoch both manipulated within-subjects,age(7,9,11)manipulated between-subjects.The results showed that:in learning phase,all three groups exhibited significant contextual cueing effect.And there was no significant difference between the three groups and adults.After scenes rotation,the learned effects were preserved only for 11 years old group in test phase Ⅰ,while the contextual cueing effects of children aged 7 and 9 were disappeared.When returned to the original viewpoint in test phase Ⅱ,the contextual cueing effects were preserved for both 9 and 11 years old groups.The study 3 aimed to explore the impact of intrinsic frames of reference on the contextual cueing effect of children.The study adopted a 2 × 2 × 3(group,context,epoch)three factor mixed experimental design.All the experimental materials in the experimental group have the same direction,and the experimental materials of the control group have two orientations.The results showed that:in learning phase,the two groups exhibited significant contextual cueing effect;after rotating the scenes,the contextual cueing effect of experimental group and control group in test phase Ⅰ and Ⅱ were both comparable to learning phase Ⅱ.Under the conditions.of this experiment,the conclusions as follow:(1)Children of 7-11 years old can exhibit significant contextual cueing,but the effect was more robust for children above 9 years old.(2)Adults can integrate the egocentric frames of reference and the environmental frames of reference for flexible spatial representation.The development law of children’s implicit spatial memory is the same as that of explicit memory.It is also developed from self-reference to environmental reference.(3)Children of 7 years old were not yet able to use intrinsic frames of reference to better spatial representation.