Switching between the Forest and the Trees: The Contribution of Global to Local Switching to Spatial Constructional Abilities in Typically Developing Children

Abstract

Background: Spatial analysis encompasses the ability to perceive the visual world by arranging the local elements (“the trees”) into a coherent global configuration (“the forest”). During childhood, this ability gradually switches from a local to a global precedence, which contributes to changes in children’s spatial construction abilities, such as drawing or building blocks. At present, it is not clear whether enhanced global or local processing or, alternatively, whether switching between these two levels best accounts for children’s spatial constructional abilities. Methods: We assessed typically developing children 7 to 8 years old on a global/local switching task and on two widely used spatial construction tasks (the Rey–Osterrieth Complex Figure and the Block Design test). Results: The ability to switch from global to local level, rather than a global or a local advantage, best accounted for children’s performance on both spatial construction tasks. Conclusions: The present findings contribute to elucidate the relationship between visual perception and spatial construction in children showing that the ease with which children switch perception from global to local processing is an important factor in their performance on tasks requiring complex drawing and block assembling.

The forest, the trees, and the leaves across adulthood: Age-related changes on a visual search task containing three-level hierarchical stimuli

“…Over the last century, the effects of aging on the processing of global/local hierarchical stimuli have been carried out by several studies. Indeed, numerous studies argued that global/local processing could be linked to the efficiency of a wide range of subsequent processing such as reading, memory processing or social cognition across the lifespan (e.g., Gerlach & Starrfelt, 2018 ; Insch et al, 2012 ; Oken et al, 1999 ; Zappullo et al, 2020 ). Particularly, age-related changes in global/local processing could impact critical cognitive processes such as face recognition and social cues processing (e.g., Insch et al, 2012 ; Oken et al, 1999 ).…”

Seeing the forest or the tree depends on personality: Evidence from process communication model during global/local visual search task

“…Further investigation will be required to confirm these assumptions, for instance using brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging or event-related potential methods, in order to investigate the brain network variations subtended the present behavioral results. It seems conceivable that the involvement of both frontal (control processing, see e.g., [41]), associated to parietal and occipital regions (visuo-attentional network, see e.g., [6,42] Recent work evidenced that performances on Navon's hierarchical stimuli relates systematically to the ability to process common real objects [36] and numerous studies argued that global and local processes could be linked to the efficiency of a wide range of abilities such as reading, memory processing, social cognition [43][44][45][46] and even decision making and reasoning efficacy [47]. These subsequent cognitive processes were thus proposed to depend on how participant combine local and global information.…”