Re-assessing the evidence for mental rotation abilities in children using computational models

TL;DR

This study uses computational models to critically evaluate evidence for mental rotation abilities in young children, suggesting that simple recognition strategies may explain observed behaviors rather than true mental rotation.

Contribution

It introduces computational modeling to reassess evidence for mental rotation in children, challenging previous interpretations based on behavioral paradigms.

Findings

Children under 5 may not develop genuine mental rotation abilities.

A simple pixel-wise comparison model can replicate children's performance.

The study questions the developmental timeline of mental rotation abilities.

Abstract

There is strong and diverse evidence for mental rotation (MR) abilities in adults. However, current evidence for MR in children rests on just a few behavioral paradigms adapted from the adult literature. Here, we leverage recent computational models of the development of children's object recognition abilities to re-assess the evidence for MR in children. The computational models simulate infants' acquisition of object representations during embodied interactions with objects. We consider two different object recognition strategies, different from MRs, and assess their ability to replicate results from three classical MR tasks assigned to children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. Our results show that MR may play no role in producing the results obtained from children younger than 5 years. In fact, we find that a simple recognition strategy that reflects a pixel-wise comparison of stimuli is sufficient to model children's behavior in the most used MR task. Thus, our study reopens the debate on how and when children develop genuine MR abilities.