Biomedical subjects

Anne R Schutte

Publications and source records attributed to Anne R Schutte.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Toward a formal theory of flexible spatial behavior: geometric category biases generalize across pointing and verbal response types.

Three experiments tested whether geometric biases--biases away from perceived reference axes--reported in spatial recall tasks with pointing responses generalized to a recognition task that required a verbal response. Seven-year-olds and adults remembered the location of a dot within a rectangle and then either reproduced its location or verbally selected a matching choice dot from a set of colored options. Results demonstrated that geometric biases generalized to verbal responses; however, the spatial span of the choice set influenced performance as well. These data suggest that the same spatial memory process gives rise to both response types in this task. Simulations of a dynamic field model buttress this claim. More generally, these results challenge accounts that posit separate spatial systems for motor and verbal responses.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Unifying representations and responses: perseverative biases arise from a single behavioral system.

A dominant account of perseverative errors in early development contends that such errors reflect a failure to inhibit a prepotent response. This study investigated whether perseveration might also arise from a failure to inhibit a prepotent representation. Children watched as a toy was hidden at an A location, waited during a delay, and then watched the experimenter find the toy. After six observation-only A trials, the toy was hidden at a B location, and children were allowed to search for the toy. Two- and 4-year-olds' responses on the B trials were significantly biased toward A even though they had never overtly responded to this location. Thus, perseverative biases in early development can arise as a result of prepotent representations, demonstrating that the prepotent-response account is incomplete. We discuss three alternative interpretations of these results, including the possibility that representational and response-based biases reflect the operation of a single, integrated behavioral system.

Child Behavior↗

PubMedDate not supplied

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

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.

Attention↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Testing the dynamic field theory: working memory for locations becomes more spatially precise over development.

The dynamic field theory predicts that biases toward remembered locations depend on the separation between targets, and the spatial precision of interactions in working memory that become enhanced over development. This was tested by varying the separation between A and B locations in a sandbox. Children searched for an object 6 times at an A location, followed by 3 trials at a B location. Two- and 4-year-olds', but not 6-year-olds', responses were biased toward A when A and B were 9-in. and 6-in. apart. When A and B were separated by 2 in., however, 4- and 6-year-olds' responses were biased toward A. Thus, the separation at which responses were biased toward A decreased across age groups, supporting the predictions of the theory.

Adult↗