M Gattis | PubMed Health

PubMed2000

Imitation of gestures in children is goal-directed.

The view that the motor program activated during imitation is organized by goals was investigated by asking pre-school children to imitate a set of hand gestures of varying complexity that were made by an experimenter sitting in front of them. In Experiments 1 and 3, children reached for the correct object (one of their own ears or one of two dots on a table) but preferred to use the ipsilateral hand. This ipsilateral preference was not observed when hand movements were made to only one ear (Experiment 2), or when movements were directed at space rather than physical objects (Experiment 3). The results are consistent with the notion that imitation is guided by goals and provide insights about how these goals are organized.

Child Behavior↗

PubMed1996

Mapping conceptual to spatial relations in visual reasoning.

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the impact of goals and perceptual relations on graph interpretation when people evaluate functional dependencies between continuous variables. Participants made inferences about the relative rate of 2 continuous linear variables (altitude and temperature). The authors varied the assignments of variables to axes, the perceived cause-effect relation between the variables, and the causal status of the variable being queried. The most striking finding was that accuracy was greater when the slope-mapping constraint was honored, which requires that the variable being queried be assigned to the vertical axis, so that steeper lines map to faster changes in the queried variable. The authors propose that graphs provide external instantiations of intermediate mental representations, enabling people to move from visuospatial representations to abstractions through the use of natural mappings between perceptual and conceptual relations.

Causality↗