Children's Memory for Events: The Challenge of Free Recall.

Early childhood is a critical period for episodic memory development, with sharp behavioral improvements between ages 4 to 7 years. Prior work has demonstrated this extensively with prompted memory tasks, but we explored performance on unprompted, free recall of a naturalistic experience in children, and how their performance relates to other cognitive measures. We asked children and adults to view a television episode, a naturalistic task for which there exists a ground truth, and assessed their free recall memory for the episode. Children's free recall performance improved dramatically with age, with many young children producing no verbal free recall whatsoever, although prompted recognition memory measures showed retention of material. However, the detail in free recall was related to both recognition and temporal order forced-choice memory performance in our full sample, showing agreement among memory measures. Free recall was strongly predicted by verbal skills, suggesting that children's sparse recall reflects verbal skill development rather than a pure mnemonic deficit. We propose that free recall has a more protracted developmental trajectory because it requires more substantial verbal skills as well as metacognitive skills that direct memory search, as compared with forced-choice memory tasks.

Unpacking the navigation toolbox: insights from comparative cognition.

The study of navigation is informed by ethological data from many species, laboratory investigation at behavioural and neurobiological levels, and computational modelling. However, the data are often species-specific, making it challenging to develop general models of how biology supports behaviour. Wiener et al. outlined a framework for organizing the results across taxa, called the 'navigation toolbox' (Wiener et al. In Animal thinking: contemporary issues in comparative cognition (eds R Menzel, J Fischer), pp. 51-76). This framework proposes that spatial cognition is a hierarchical process in which sensory inputs at the lowest level are successively combined into ever-more complex representations, culminating in a metric or quasi-metric internal model of the world (cognitive map). Some animals, notably humans, also use symbolic representations to produce an external representation, such as a verbal description, signpost or map that allows communication of spatial information or instructions between individuals. Recently, new discoveries have extended our understanding of how spatial representations are constructed, highlighting that the hierarchical relationships are bidirectional, with higher levels feeding back to influence lower levels. In the light of these new developments, we revisit the navigation toolbox, elaborate it and incorporate new findings. The toolbox provides a common framework within which the results from different taxa can be described and compared, yielding a more detailed, mechanistic and generalized understanding of navigation.

Episodic memory development: Bridging animal and human research.

Human episodic memory is not functionally evident until about 2 years of age and continues to develop into the school years. Behavioral studies have elucidated this developmental timeline and its constituent processes. In tandem, lesion and neurophysiological studies in non-human primates and rodents have identified key neural substrates and circuit mechanisms that may underlie episodic memory development. Despite this progress, collaborative efforts between psychologists and neuroscientists remain limited, hindering progress. Here, we seek to bridge human and non-human episodic memory development research by offering a comparative review of studies using humans, non-human primates, and rodents. We highlight critical theoretical and methodological issues that limit cross-fertilization and propose a common research framework, adaptable to different species, that may facilitate cross-species research endeavors.

How Can We Best Assess Spatial Skills? Practical and Conceptual Challenges.

Spatial thinking skills are associated with performance, persistence, and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) school subjects. Because STEM knowledge and skills are integral to developing a well-trained workforce within and beyond STEM, spatial skills have become a major focus of cognitive, developmental, and educational research. However, these efforts are greatly hampered by the current lack of access to reliable, valid, and well-normed spatial tests. Although there are hundreds of spatial tests, they are often hard to access and use, and information about their psychometric properties is frequently lacking. Additional problems include (1) substantial disagreement about what different spatial tests measure-even two tests with similar names may measure very different constructs; (2) the inability to measure some STEM-relevant spatial skills by any existing tests; and (3) many tests only being available for specific age groups. The first part of this report delineates these problems, as documented in a series of structured and open-ended interviews and surveys with colleagues. The second part outlines a roadmap for addressing the problems. We present possibilities for developing shared testing systems that would allow researchers to test many participants through the internet. We discuss technological innovations, such as virtual reality, which could facilitate the testing of navigation and other spatial skills. Developing a bank of testing resources will empower researchers and educators to explore and support spatial thinking in their disciplines, as well as drive the development of a comprehensive and coherent theoretical understanding of spatial thinking.

What have we learned from research on the "geometric module"?

This article is an overview of the research and controversy initiated by Cheng's (Cognition, 23(2), 149-178, 1986) article hypothesizing a purely geometric module in spatial representation. Hundreds of experiments later, we know much more about spatial behavior across a very wide array of species, ages, and kinds of conditions, but there is still no consensus model of the phenomena. I argue for an adaptive combination approach that entails several principles: (1) a focus on ecological niches and the spatial information they offer; (2) an approach to development that is experience-expectant: (3) continued plasticity as environmental conditions change; (4) language as one of many cognitive tools that can support spatial behavior.

A Growth Mindset Message Leads Parents to Choose More Challenging Learning Activities.

Prior research has shown that the home learning environment (HLE) is critical in the development of spatial skills and that various parental beliefs influence the HLE. However, a comprehensive analysis of the impact of different parental beliefs on the spatial HLE remains lacking, leaving unanswered questions about which specific parental beliefs are most influential and whether inducing a growth mindset can enhance the spatial HLE. To address these gaps, we conducted an online study with parents of 3- to 5-year-olds. We found that parents' growth mindset about their children's ability strongly predicted the spatial HLE after controlling for parents' motivational beliefs about their children, beliefs about their own ability, children's age, children's gender, and family SES. Further, reading an article about growth mindset led parents to choose more challenging spatial learning activities for their children. These findings highlight the critical role of parents' growth mindset in the spatial HLE. Crucially, these findings demonstrate that general growth mindset messages without specific suggestions for parental practices can influence parental behavior intentions. Further, these effects were also observed in the control domain of literacy, underscoring the broad relevance of the growth mindset in the HLE.

Tracking informal fraction knowledge and its correlates across first grade.

Young children have informal knowledge of fractions before learning about fraction symbols in school. In the current study, we followed 103 children in the Mid-Atlantic United States from the fall to the spring of first grade to characterize the development of individual differences in early informal fraction knowledge, as well as its relation to other mathematical and cognitive skills. Most children in our sample showed some early fraction knowledge at the beginning of first grade, especially with nonsymbolic fractions and halving, and this knowledge improved over the school year without explicit instruction in fractions. However, there were large individual differences in early fraction knowledge at the start of first grade, which explained significant variance in math achievement at the end of first grade, even when controlling for whole number knowledge and a variety of cognitive skills. Start-of-year whole number knowledge, but not spatial scaling or proportional reasoning, also predicted early end-of-year fraction knowledge. These data can inform activities for learning in the early years to foster both early fraction and integer knowledge in parallel, which may better prepare students for later formal instruction in fractions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Studying the Development of Navigation Using Virtual Environments.

Research on spatial navigation is essential to understanding how mobile species adapt to their environments. Such research increasingly uses virtual environments (VEs) because, although VE has drawbacks, it allows for standardization of procedures, precision in measuring behaviors, ease in introducing variation, and cross-investigator comparability. Developmental researchers have used a wide range of VE testing methods, including desktop computers, gaming consoles, virtual reality, and phone applications. We survey the paradigms to guide researchers' choices, organizing them by their characteristics using a framework proposed by Girard (2022) in which navigation is reactive or deliberative, and may be tied to sensory input or not. This organization highlights what representations each paradigm indicates. VE tools have enriched our picture of the development of navigation, but much research remains to be done, e.g., determining retest reliability, comparing performance on different paradigms, validating performance against real-world behavior and open sharing. Reliable and valid assessments available on open-science repositories are essential for work on the development of navigation, its neural bases, and its implications for other cognitive domains.

Using a picture (or a thousand words) for supporting spatial knowledge of a complex virtual environment.

External representations powerfully support and augment complex human behavior. When navigating, people often consult external representations to help them find the way to go, but do maps or verbal instructions improve spatial knowledge or support effective wayfinding? Here, we examine spatial knowledge with and without external representations in two studies where participants learn a complex virtual environment. In the first study, we asked participants to generate their own maps or verbal instructions, partway through learning. We found no evidence of improved spatial knowledge in a pointing task requiring participants to infer the direction between two targets, either on the same route or on different routes, and no differences between groups in accurately recreating a map of the target landmarks. However, as a methodological note, pointing was correlated with the accuracy of the maps that participants drew. In the second study, participants had access to an accurate map or set of verbal instructions that they could study while learning the layout of target landmarks. Again, we found no evidence of differentially improved spatial knowledge in the pointing task, although we did find that the map group could recreate a map of the target landmarks more accurately. However, overall improvement was high. There was evidence that the nature of improvement across all conditions was specific to initial navigation ability levels. Our findings add to a mixed literature on the role of external representations for navigation and suggest that more substantial intervention-more scaffolding, explicit training, enhanced visualization, perhaps with personalized sequencing-may be necessary to improve navigation ability.

Setting boundaries: Development of neural and behavioral event cognition in early childhood.

The ongoing stream of sensory experience is so complex and ever-changing that we tend to parse this experience at "event boundaries," which structures and strengthens memory. Memory processes undergo profound change across early childhood. Whether young children also divide their ongoing processing along event boundaries, and if those boundaries relate to memory, could provide important insight into the development of memory systems. In Study 1, 4-7-year-old children and adults segmented a cartoon, and we tested their memory. Children's event boundaries were more variable than adults' and differed in location and consistency of agreement. Older children's event segmentation was more adult-like than younger children's, and children who segmented events more like adults had better memory for those events. In Study 2, we asked whether these developmental differences in event segmentation had their roots in distinct neural representations. A separate group of 4-8-year-old children watched the same cartoon while undergoing an fMRI scan. In the right hippocampus, greater pattern dissimilarity across event boundaries compared to within events was evident for both child and adult behavioral boundaries, suggesting children and adults share similar event cognition. However, the boundaries identified by a data-driven Hidden Markov Model found that a different brain region-the left and right angular gyrus-aligned only with event boundaries defined by children. Overall, these data suggest that children's event cognition is reasonably well-developed by age 4 but continues to become more adult-like across early childhood. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Adults naturally break their experience into events, which structures and strengthens memory, but less is known about children's event perception and memory. Study 1 had adults and children segment and remember events from an animated show, and Study 2 compared those segmentations to other children's fMRI data. Children show better recognition and temporal order memory and more adult-like event segmentation with age, and children who segment more like adults have better memory. Children's and adults' behavioral boundaries mapped onto pattern similarity differences in hippocampus, and children's behavioral boundaries matched a data-driven model's boundaries in angular gyrus.

"This is hard!" Children's and parents' talk about difficulty during dyadic interactions.

Children's beliefs about the contribution of effort and ability to success and failure shape their decisions to persist or give up on challenging tasks, with consequences for their academic success. But how do children learn about the concept of "challenge"? Prior work has shown that parents' verbal responses to success and failure shape children's motivational beliefs. In this study, we explore another type of talk-parent and child talk about difficulty-which could contribute to children's motivational beliefs. We performed secondary analyses of two observational studies of parent-child interactions in the United States (Boston and Philadelphia) from age 3 to fourth grade (Study 1, 51% girls, 65.5% White, at least 43.2% below Federal poverty line) and at first grade (Study 2, 54% girls, 72% White, family income-to-needs ratio M [SD] = 4.41 [2.95]) to identify talk about difficulty, characterize the content of those statements, and assess whether task context, child and parent gender, child age, and other parent motivational talk were associated with the quantity of child and parent difficulty talk. We found that many families did discuss difficulty, with variation among families. Parents and children tended to use general statements to talk about difficulty (e.g., "That was hard!"), and task context affected child and parent difficulty talk. In the NICHD-SECCYD dataset, mothers' highlighting how task features contributed to task difficulty was positively correlated with their process praise, suggesting that this talk could be motivationally relevant. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring Spatial Perspective Taking: Analysis of Four Measures Using Item Response Theory.

Research on spatial thinking requires reliable and valid measures of individual differences in various component skills. Spatial perspective taking (PT)-the ability to represent viewpoints different from one's own-is one kind of spatial skill that is especially relevant to navigation. This study had two goals. First, the psychometric properties of four PT tests were examined: Four Mountains Task (FMT), Spatial Orientation Task (SOT), Perspective-Taking Task for Adults (PTT-A), and Photographic Perspective-Taking Task (PPTT). Using item response theory (IRT), item difficulty, discriminability, and efficiency of item information functions were evaluated. Second, the relation of PT scores to general intelligence, working memory, and mental rotation (MR) was assessed. All tasks showed good construct validity except for FMT. PPTT tapped a wide range of PT ability, with maximum measurement precision at average ability. PTT-A captured a lower range of ability. Although SOT contributed less measurement information than other tasks, it did well across a wide range of PT ability. After controlling for general intelligence and working memory, original and IRT-refined versions of PT tasks were each related to MR. PTT-A and PPTT showed relatively more divergent validity from MR than SOT. Tests of dimensionality indicated that PT tasks share one common PT dimension, with secondary task-specific factors also impacting the measurement of individual differences in performance. Advantages and disadvantages of a hybrid PT test that includes a combination of items across tasks are discussed.

Evaluating the effects of a programming error on a virtual environment measure of spatial navigation behavior.

Relying on shared tasks and stimuli to conduct research can enhance the replicability of findings and allow a community of researchers to collect large data sets across multiple experiments. This approach is particularly relevant for experiments in spatial navigation, which often require the development of unfamiliar large-scale virtual environments to test participants. One challenge with shared platforms is that undetected technical errors, rather than being restricted to individual studies, become pervasive across many studies. Here, we discuss the discovery of a software bug in a virtual environment platform used to investigate individual differences in spatial navigation: Virtual Silcton. The bug, which was difficult to detect for several reasons, resulted in storing the absolute value of a direction in a pointing task rather than the signed direction and rendered the original sign of the direction unrecoverable. To assess the impact of the bug on published findings, we collected a new data set for comparison. Results revealed that although the bug caused suppression in pointing errors and had different effects across people (less accurate navigators had more suppression), the effect of the bug on published data is small, partially explaining the difficulty in detecting the bug. We also used the new data set to develop a tool that allows researchers who have previously used Virtual Silcton to evaluate the impact of the bug on their findings. We summarize the ways that shared open materials, shared data, and collaboration can pave the way for better science to prevent errors in the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Building a Cognitive Science of Human Variation: Individual Differences in Spatial Navigation.

The aim of this issue is to take stock of cognitive science of human variation in the field of spatial navigation, an important domain in which debates have often assumed an invariant human mind. Addressing the challenge of individual differences requires cognitive scientists to change their practices in several ways. First, we need to consider how to design measures and paradigms that have adequate psychometric characteristics. Second, using reliable, efficient, and valid measures, we need to examine how people vary from time to time, both in the short run due to emotions, such as stress or time pressure, and in the longer run, due to training or living in physical environments that require wayfinding skills. Third, we need to study people different from the traditional college participants, including variations in age, gender, education, culture, physical environment, and possible interactions among these variables.

Exploration patterns shape cognitive map learning.

Spontaneous, volitional spatial exploration is crucial for building up a cognitive map of the environment. However, decades of research have primarily measured the fidelity of cognitive maps after discrete, controlled learning episodes. We know little about how cognitive maps are formed during naturalistic free exploration. Here, we investigated whether exploration trajectories predicted cognitive map accuracy, and how these patterns were shaped by environmental structure. In two experiments, participants freely explored a previously unfamiliar virtual environment. We related their exploration trajectories to a measure of how long they spent in areas with high global environmental connectivity (integration, as assessed by space syntax). In both experiments, we found that participants who spent more time on paths that offered opportunities for integration formed more accurate cognitive maps. Interestingly, we found no support for our pre-registered hypothesis that self-reported trait differences in navigation ability would mediate this relationship. Our findings suggest that exploration patterns predict cognitive map accuracy, even for people who self-report low ability, and highlight the importance of considering both environmental structure and individual variability in formal theory- and model-building.

Tracing the origins of the STEM gender gap: The contribution of childhood spatial skills.

Despite some gains, women continue to be underrepresented in many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Using a national longitudinal dataset of 690 participants born in 1991, we tested whether spatial skills, measured in middle childhood, would help explain this gender gap. We modeled the relation between 4th-grade spatial skills and STEM majors while simultaneously accounting for competing cognitive and motivational mechanisms. Strong spatial skills in 4th grade directly increased the likelihood of choosing STEM college majors, above and beyond math achievement and motivation, verbal achievement and motivation, and family background. Additionally, 4th-grade spatial skills indirectly predicted STEM major choice via math achievement and motivation in the intervening years. Further, our findings suggest that gender differences in 4th-grade spatial skills contribute to women's underrepresentation in STEM majors. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Using a national longitudinal dataset, we found 4th-grade spatial skills directly predicted STEM college major choice after accounting for multiple cognitive and motivational mechanisms. Strong spatial skills in 4th grade also elevated STEM major choice via enhanced math achievement and motivation in the intervening years. Gender differences in 4th-grade spatial skills contributed to women's underrepresentation in STEM college majors.

Children show adult-like hippocampal pattern similarity for familiar but not novel events.

The ability to detect differences among similar events in our lives is a crucial aspect of successful episodic memory performance, which develops across early childhood. The neural substrate of this ability is supported by operations in the medial temporal lobe (MTL). Here, we used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to measure neural pattern similarity in hippocampus, perirhinal cortex, and parahippocampal cortex for 4- to 10-year-old children and adults during naturalistic viewing of clips from the same compared to different movies. Further, we assessed the role of prior exposure to individual movie clips on pattern similarity in the MTL. In both age groups, neural pattern similarity in hippocampus was lower for clips drawn from the same movies compared to those drawn from different movies, suggesting that related content activates processes focused on keeping representations with shared content distinct. However, children showed this only for movies with which they had prior exposures, whereas adults showed the effect regardless of any prior exposures to the movies. These findings suggest that children require repeated exposure to stimuli to show adult-like MTL functioning in distinguishing among similar events.

Fathers' and mothers' praise and spatial language during play with first graders: Patterns of interaction and relations to math achievement.

Parents provide motivational and cognitive support within the same interaction, yet researchers have investigated these separately. We examined two key aspects of parental support, praise (motivational support) and spatial language (cognitive support), from fathers and mothers during three tasks with their first-grade children (6-7-year-olds; N = 107; 56 girls; 72.0% White, 23.4% Black). Parents' praise and spatial language varied by task but not child sex: Both parents produced more praise in the Etch-a-Sketch and block tasks than the card game and produced more spatial language in the Etch-a-Sketch task than other tasks. We further examined whether praise and spatial language in the two spatial tasks (Etch-a-Sketch and block construction) were related to children's later math and spatial skills. We found neither additive nor multiplicative effects of parents' praise or spatial language. We also did not see additive or multiplicative effects of fathers' and mothers' support. However, fathers' greater spatial language at first grade was negatively associated with boys' (but not girls') math achievement in third grade, with greater father spatial tokens related to their sons' lower math achievement. This suggests that boys may perceive fathers' support more negatively than girls do or that fathers may offer additional support for boys with lower abilities. Taken together, this study emphasizes the importance of considering contexts in examining parental support. The correlational nature of the study warrants future research to establish causal relations and to enhance our understanding of multifaceted parent-child interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Longitudinal development of cognitive mapping from childhood to adolescence.

Cross-sectional studies have suggested that the ability to form cognitive maps increases throughout childhood and reaches adult levels during early adolescence. However, adults show large individual differences in their ability to relate local routes to form a global map. Children also vary, but when does variation stabilize? We asked participants from a previously published cross-sectional study [Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (2018), Vol. 170, pp. 86-106] to return for a second session of testing 3 years later to examine whether longitudinal stability is more evident at older ages. The subsample of 50 of the original 105 participants available for retesting did not differ from the original sample on male-female ratio or Session 1 task performance. We reassessed performance on the Virtual Silcton navigation paradigm, the Spatial Orientation Test (SOT), and the Mental Rotation Test (MRT) and added parents' scores on the SOT and MRT at Timepoint 2. Our initial analyses of normative development aligned with prior cross-sectional findings; overall navigation performance reached adult levels of proficiency around 12 years of age. In addition, variation in route integration abilities, as measured by between-route pointing, stabilized around 12 years of age; that is, longitudinal stability was higher in the older cohort than in the younger cohort. The same pattern appeared for the MRT.