Tasks; Visual Tracking

To identify the role of the child's own action in the development of the ability to coordinate perspectives, a spatial localization task was presented to 2 groups of children: 16 children between 18 and 24 months old, and 16 children between 42 and 48 months old. A reward was hidden randomly in one of two identical left-right locations on a turntable as the child watched. Then, either a 180-degree rotation of the turntable by the experimenter or a move by the child to the opposite side of the table reversed the location of the hidden reward with respect to the child. The entire turntable was covered during half of the trials of each type of movement to measure reliance on visual tracking of the correct container. Children received the reward when they correctly identified its hidden location; children's accuracy in locating the reward and a rating of tracking were recorded. Results indicated that some ability to coordinate perspe 'ives mentally is present in children as young as 18 months. Better performance when the child moved as opposed to when the child watched the movement supported the hypothesis that action plays a role in the development of ability. Results also indicated that performance improved with age. (MM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document