Sami Yousif is a 2016 graduate who majored in Psychology. He was awarded a Spring 2016 Conference Grant which he used to attend the 2016 Cognitive Development Society meeting.
Over fall break, I attended the meeting of the Cognitive Development Society (CDS) in Columbus, Ohio. This was my first time attending a development conference. I was particularly excited about the spatial-thinking preconference, facilitated by prominent researchers in the field of spatial cognition including David Uttal, Susan Levine, and Nora Newcombe. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss my work with these professors.
The work I was presenting at CDS was a continuation of work which was originally funded by an independent URP grant this past spring. The research is inspired by a simple question: what geometric features guide reorientation in children? Responding to claims that children will use only certain pieces of information (e.g., distance, direction; Lee et al., 2012) to reorient, we wanted to show that children are able to use more than a limited number of discrete cues for purposes of navigation and reorientation. Specifically, we wanted to know if children could use length information that was presented in the appropriate context. We hypothesized that previous experiments had confounded distance information with global shape information, leading to the incorrect conclusion that distance per se is a preferred cue.
We test geometric intuitions by having children play a hide-and-seek game in a radially-symmetric room (i.e., there are no features or obstacles which provide information relevant to reorientation). Within the room, we set up four separate walls which provide certain geometric information. In one condition, for example, equal-length walls are placed in such a way as to form a rectangle with side lengths in a ratio of 2:1, whereas in another condition walls of varying lengths (also in a 2:1 ratio) are placed equidistant from one another, forming a square. Examples of these spaces can be seen below.
Each child hides a toy in one of four containers. They are then spun around and asked to search for a toy. We look to see if children search above-chance at the correct corner and its geometric-equivalent (colored in blue in the above figure). As expected, children were able to use length when it was deconfounded from global shape. In one condition, we added appendages to the walls to reduce the likelihood of Gestalt completion of the shape; in another condition, we moved the containers inward such that the actionable space (i.e., the space in which kids moved around) was dissociable from the global shape defined by the walls. In both instances, children were above-chance at localizing the hidden target.
During the poster session, I was able to meet and discuss the project with Elizabeth Spelke, whose work provided the basis for this project. We had a brief but lively discussion on the implications of these findings. Other researchers provided positive feedback as well and suggested some alternative interpretations of our findings. For example, a few people mentioned the importance of reestablishing heading direction to reorient. We also discussed how heading direction might apply to medial versus principal axis models of reorientation.
Beyond geometry and spatial-thinking, there were many interesting talks that applied to other work I am doing in the Spatial Cognition Lab. As I am interested in vision and perception broadly, I was fascinated by one research group which raises chicks in strictly-controlled virtual environments. By manipulating what each chick sees across its lifespan, the researchers are able to ask unique questions about the development of the visual system. Though the researchers were reluctant to make any claims about how these findings extend to the development of the human visual system, they expressed excitement about the possibilities this line of research opens up.
In another talk, a group of researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural tuning to number in the left and right intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Interestingly, they found that tuning curves for number were fully mature in right IPS by five or six years of age but not in left IPS, consistent with previous findings. What was most impressive about this research is merely the fact that they were able to scan such young children; this work is essentially unprecedented in this way. Being interested in numerical cognition, I thought this talk was exceptionally interesting. In fact, it is similar to a new project I am working on with graduate students in the Psychology department, which is using fMRI to investigate magnitude representations in parietal cortex.
All things considered, I had a very positive experience at CDS: I learned a lot about research broadly, received valuable feedback on my work, and also received helpful advice about selecting and applying to graduate programs. I am very thankful to URP for making this possible, and I hope I will have the opportunity to attend more conferences in the future.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Conference Grants.
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