Date of Award
5-2009
Document type
dissertation
Access Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Neuroscience and Behavior
First Advisor
Neil E. Berthier
Second Advisor
Matthew C. Davidson
Third Advisor
Rachel E. Keen
Subject Categories
Cognitive Psychology | Developmental Psychology | Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Abstract
Previous research using violation-of-expectation paradigms suggests that very young infants have a good understanding of unobserved physical events. Yet toddlers appear to lack this knowledge when confronted with the door task, a visuospatial reasoning task which parallels ones used in the habituation/looking time studies. Many studies have been conducted in an effort to determine why toddlers perform poorly on the door task yet the answer remains unclear. The current study used a correlational approach to investigate door task performance from both psychological (executive function), and neuroscience (prefrontal cortex) perspectives. Children between the ages of 2 ½ - 3 years were tested on the standard door task as well as four other tasks. Three of the tasks were believed to activate prefrontal cortex: the three boxes-stationary, a spatial working memory task; the three boxes-scrambled, a non-spatial working memory task; and the three pegs task, an inhibitory control task. The fourth task was a recognition memory task which had been previously linked to the medial temporal lobe. Only a single task, the three pegs task, was found to correlate with door task performance (r = .510, p
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/2ds2-j629
Recommended Citation
Price, Iris Louella, "Visuospatial Reasoning in Toddlers: A Correlational Study of Door Task Performance" (2009). Open Access Dissertations. 63.
https://doi.org/10.7275/2ds2-j629
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/63
Included in
Cognitive Psychology Commons, Developmental Psychology Commons, Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons