Are young children able to learn exploratory strategies by observation?

Abstract

New competencies may be learned through active experience (experiential learning or learning by doing) or observation of others’ experiences (learning by observation). Observing another person performing a complex action facilitates the observer’s acquisition of the same action. The present research is aimed at analyzing if the observation of specific explorative strategies adopted in a constrained environment, such as the Radial Arm Maze (RAM), could help young children to explore the maze and to build a cognitive spatial map of the explored environment. To this aim young children were randomly assigned to three groups: children who performed the RAM task following the observation of an actor solving the same maze by putting into action a highly structured exploratory strategy; children who performed the RAM task following the observation of the actor solving the same maze by putting into action a less structured exploratory strategy; children who directly performed the RAM task without any observation. The main result of the present research is that the children who observed the highly structured and correct exploratory strategy spent less time, made fewer errors, exhibited a longer spatial span, and thus they explored the maze more efficiently than the children who directly performed the RAM task without any observation. This finding indicates that when the observed explorative procedure is structured, sequential and repetitive the action understanding and information storage processes are more effective. Importantly, the observation of specific spatial strategies helped the children to build the cognitive spatial map of the explored environment and consequently to acquire/enrich the declarative knowledge of the environment.

The Development of Spatial Memory Analyzed by Means of Ecological Walking Task

“…Conversely, the drawings of younger children were characterized exclusively by the egocentric perspective. These data suggest a clear age-related improvement in the mental representative mapping abilities and support the idea that exploring the space appropriately is a necessary condition in order to build a cognitive spatial map (Mandolesi et al., 2003; Foti et al., 2018).…”

“…In examining the drawings of the three spatial configurations, we evaluated the type of representation, an index rating the egocentric/allocentric ratio of drawings, using a 5-point Likert scale (from 1: clearly egocentric, to 5: clearly allocentric), according to Foti et al., 2018. To objectively assess this parameter, we asked two coders, blind to experimental conditions and expert in mental spatial representations and human navigation, to score each drawing according to its egocentricity/allocentricity.…”

Multi-axis Attentive Prediction for Sparse EventData: An Application to Crime Prediction

“…To motivate our approach, a recent study in recognition science [47] shows that children learn new concepts from the same object by changing their observation angles. We believe the same logic holds for SEP.…”

Curiosity-driven Intuitive Physics Learning

“…the body budget parameters is shown in equation (1). Score generated for object permanence is given in equation (2).…”

“…Here we present an approach that can potentially be used to design machines that can 'understand' the physical world around them. Our model draws inspiration from the way infants learn [2]. It begins with parsing the surroundings by sensing all that is in the physical space around them, interacting with the objects to understand the dynamics, experimenting with them, and deriving hypotheses and predictions, and eventually reasoning on the body budget parameters (shape constancy, spatial-temporal continuity, object permanence).…”