Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 64

3.3.2.1 What Developmental Psychology Has to Say on Mental

Spatial Representations

Developmental psychology's interest in spatial cognition was kicked off by pioneers
creating two schools of thought in parallel. One school is based on the work of
Piaget and Inhelder [ 166 ] , who assumed an innate desire and ability of children to
learn from perceptions. The other school is based on the sociocultural approach of
Vygotsky [ 229 ] , who assumed a greater role of education for the cognitive devel-
opment of children. In the tradition of Piaget and Inhelder, cognitive psychology
studies mental representations of space and revisions of these representations, while
neuroscience studies the brain activities in perceptual integration and spatial prob-
lem solving. In the tradition of Vygotsky, cognitive anthropology and linguistics
study cultural differences in spatial conceptualizations and spatial communication.
These conflicting approaches are still noticeable, especially since the representative
communities continue in disagreement, as Newcombe et al. mention:
Do infants develop into competent adults in a protracted course of development propelled
by interactions with the physical environment (as Piaget thought)? Or do they develop due
to social interactions, linguistic input, and apprenticeship in the use of cultural tools such as
maps or the use of star systems (as Vygotsky thought)? Or are they actually equipped from
the beginning with core knowledge of objects and space, later augmented by the acquisition
of human language (as argued in the past few decades by Spelke)? ( [ 156 ] , p. 565).

At another place, Newcombe and Huttenlocher offer a perspective for reconciliation:
Spatial development is an excellent candidate for a domain with strong innate under-
pinnings, due to its adaptive significance for all mobile organisms. Piaget, however,
offered a developmental theory in which innate underpinnings of spatial understanding
were rather humble, hypothesizing that simple sensorimotor experiences such as reaching
are the departure point for a gradually increasing spatial competence that emerges from
the interaction of children with the world. His approach dominated developmental thinking
about space for several decades, and inspired a great deal of research, some lines of which
are still active. Recently, however, there has been a return of interest in a more strongly
nativist theory in which infants come equipped with specific knowledge of the spatial world,
along with similar specific understandings of domains such as language, physical causality,
and number ([ 155 ] , p. 734)
Gopnik suggests a developmental process based on theory theory (in other contexts
theory theory is also called folk theories). An infant, reaching out, collects embodied
experiences and tests with these experiences its first, primitive theories about space.
Causality, or at least probability, learned from repetition will lead to revisions and
the development of increasingly mature theories [ 70 , 71 , 165 ] . Theory building
mechanisms can be specialization by adding a constraint to a theory limiting it to
special sorts or cases, generalization by removing such a constraint if a theory has
been found to be a special case of a more general theory, and dynamic weighting
between theories to assign importance to favored theories [ 224 ] .Basedonthese
mechanisms the infant will learn, for example, that some things are out of reach,
or that some things can be stacked, or that all the perceptual stimuli caused by
a car form a whole, and will move together when the car moves. Thus, theory
theory is about concept formation [ 132 ] , and generally related to space (anything