Perseveration in barrier crossing.

Abstract

The phenomenon of response perseveration has captivated psychologists for years, with the majority of theories of this effect focusing primarily on the cognitive, spatially oriented nature of this behavior. The current project examined whether response perseveration would also occur within a task requiring little cognitive spatial resources--barrier crossing. Across three experiments, significant response perseveration was observed in toddlers' choices of which side of a barrier to cross. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrated the basic effect of response perseveration in barrier crossing, Experiment 2 showed that perseveration would continue even when the chosen side was more difficult to cross than the nonchosen side, and Experiment 3 demonstrated that perseverations were based on an environment-centered reference frame, as opposed to a body-centered reference frame. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theoretical accounts of response perseveration specifically, and with regard to perceptual-motor relations more generally.

To Cue or Not to Cue: Toddlers’ Use of Beacons and Associative Cues in Object‐displacement Tasks

“…More generally, these findings coincide with a recent theoretical proposal by Schmuckler and colleagues (Collimore & Schmuckler, ; Jowkar‐Baniani & Schmuckler, , ; Mangalindan & Schmuckler, ; Schmuckler, ,b) emphasizing the importance of perceptual and motor contextual information in driving behavior in contexts assumed to rely heavily on conceptual processing. Examining the dimensional change card sort task (e.g., Zelazo & Frye, ; Zelazo, Müller, Frye, & Marcovitch, ), for instance, Jowkar‐Baniani and Schmuckler () demonstrated that modifying the perceptual characteristics of the background of the to‐be‐sorted cards (i.e., its color or shape) significantly increased children's accuracy in this task.…”

The role of perceptual similarity of the task environments in children’s perseverative responding

“…The fact that such information significantly and systematically influenced the use of such representations highlights the importance of perceptual information in such tasks. Although implicitly recognized as important by varying theoretical accounts of children's symbolic representation abilities, the role played by such perceptual information has clearly been underemphasized in such accounts, making it a somewhat neglected factor in explaining children's behavior (see Schmuckler, 2013aSchmuckler, , 2013b, for reviews). More generally, these findings provide important insights into the operation of children's cognitive processing and development; clearly, future work will benefit from considering the role of such information in greater detail.…”

Absence of Lateral Navigational Bias in Young Children

“…Some of the children in Experiment 2 ran over the cone, rather than to one side of it, possibly because it did not impede their progress (cf. Schmuckler, 1996Schmuckler, , 2013. While the formats of the three experiments diff ered slightly in the shape of the rectangle (4' by 8', 2.5′ by 9′, and 6′ by 9′) and the obstacle in the middle (tripod, cone, and plunger), the robustness and variety of settings of previous research into navigational directional preferences supports the hypothesis that such diff erences are probably not likely to systematically infl uence the biases of the participants ( Robinson, 1933 ;Karev, 2000 ;Bitgood, 2006 ;Weyers, et al ., 2006 ;Bitgood, et al ., 2013 ).…”