Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 120, Issue 2, August 2011, Pages 186-201
Cognition

Cognitive effects of language on human navigation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.004Get rights and content

Abstract

Language has been linked to spatial representation and behavior in humans, but the nature of this effect is debated. Here, we test whether simple verbal expressions improve 4-year-old children’s performance in a disoriented search task in a small rectangular room with a single red landmark wall. Disoriented children’s landmark-guided search for a hidden object was dramatically enhanced when the experimenter used certain verbal expressions to designate the landmark during the hiding event. Both a spatial expression (“I’m hiding the sticker at the red/white wall”) and a non-spatial but task-relevant expression (“The red/white wall can help you get the sticker”) enhanced children’s search, relative to uncued controls. By contrast, a verbal expression that drew attention to the landmark in a task-irrelevant manner (“Look at this pretty red/white wall”) produced no such enhancement. These findings provide further evidence that language changes spatial behavior in children and illuminate one mechanism through which language exerts its effect: by helping children understand the relevance of landmarks for encoding locations.

Introduction

Navigating creatures use many types of information to represent their position and orientation in space, including self-generated movement, landmark objects, polarized light, and the overall layout of surrounding surfaces (Alerstam, 2006, Gallistel, 1990, Muheim et al., 2006). In humans, language has been linked to spatial representation and behavior, particularly in the use of landmarks (Hermer-Vasquez et al., 2001, Pyers et al., 2010), but the role of language in human navigation is not clear. Effects of language on navigation might represent a subset of a broader class of experiences that could influence navigation through domain-general mechanisms, or such effects might be specific to the domain of language. In either case, the mechanisms through which language plays any role in spatial cognition have not been specified. Language may direct attention to, enhance memory for, or integrate distinct sources of information about the environment (e.g., Frank et al., 2008, Haun et al., 2006, Landau and Lakusta, 2009, Spelke and Tsivkin, 2001, Waxman and Markow, 1995). Furthermore, these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and language could have multiple effects on representations of the environment. Indeed, a recent study demonstrated that mastery of distinct aspects of spatial language is related to performance on different spatial tasks (Pyers et al., 2010). Here, we investigate specific roles that language could play in the development of spatial cognition. We systematically vary the verbal descriptions that children hear during a disoriented search task and test which features of language affect their navigation.

Previous research shows that children reliably use certain geometric properties of an environment, like relative wall lengths, to find a location after becoming disoriented (reviewed in Cheng and Newcombe, 2005, Hermer and Spelke, 1994, Hermer and Spelke, 1996, Learmonth et al., 2002, Learmonth et al., 2001). Under many conditions, children fail to use other visual features of the room to guide their search. For instance, children’s search is not guided by the distinction between a red wall and a white wall, or between alternating red and blue walls, in a square room (Lourenco and Huttenlocher, 2007, Wang et al., 1999), or by a colored patch of fabric on one side of a cylindrical room (Gouteux & Spelke, 2001), although the color difference is salient to them and accessible in other types of tasks. In contrast, two recent studies have reported above-chance performance in disoriented search tasks that required young children to integrate the relation between a hidden object and a square room with two walls differing in brightness (Nardini, Atkinson, & Burgess, 2008), an octagonal room with one colored wall (Newcombe, Ratliff, Shallcross, & Twyman, 2009), and a cylindrical room with a distinctively patterned quilt on one side (Newcombe et al., 2009). A different study, however, reported failure in a cylindrical room with two dark patches on a white background (Lee & Spelke, 2010). The reasons for the discrepant results are not clear, but it should be noted that even the successes are just barely (though significantly) above-chance, leaving room for language to enhance children’s performance in all the above situations.

In animals, landmark use is influenced by rearing experience (Brown, Spetch, & Hurd, 2007), training (Gouteux et al., 2001, Sovrano et al., 2002), and motivation (Dudchenko, Goodridge, Seiterle, & Taube, 1997). Children’s use of landmark features in a reorientation task can be influenced by previous experience, the nature of the features, and the size of the enclosure. A series of studies has shown that children use landmarks much more readily when the arena is four times as large as the 4′ × 6′ (1.2 m × 1.8 m) room used in Hermer and Spelke’s original (1994) study (Learmonth et al., 2002). In adults, different performance patterns emerge in small and larger arenas, both in a cue-conflict paradigm (Ratliff & Newcombe, 2008a) and in a dual-task paradigm with verbal shadowing (Ratliff & Newcombe, 2008b), with larger rooms consistently evoking more reliance on visual landmarks and smaller rooms evoking more reliance on geometric properties. This difference has primarily been used to argue against the hypothesis that an encapsulated ‘geometric module’ selectively uses geometric information, and ignores featural information, in reorientation tasks (Learmonth et al., 2008, Learmonth et al., 2002, Ratliff and Newcombe, 2008a, Twyman and Newcombe, 2010). Whether or not geometric information is processed through a modular, pre-attentive process, it is likely that landmark use depends on attention (see Doeller & Burgess, 2008) and that it is enhanced by increases in landmark size (i.e., a red wall compared to a red patch on a wall; see Gouteux et al., 2001). 1

Although many studies report limited or no effects of practice on children’s success in the disoriented search task (e.g., Learmonth et al., 2002, Wang et al., 1999), one important study demonstrated that some forms of experience can boost children’s ability to integrate the landmark into search, even in a small space. Twyman, Friedman, and Spetch (2007) pre-trained 4- and 5-year-old children in a room shaped like an equilateral triangle with each wall a different color (yellow, blue, and red). The object was always hidden at the center of the yellow wall. Once children achieved a criterion of three correct searches in a row, they were taken to a rectangular room with one yellow wall where the object was hidden in a corner adjacent to the yellow wall prior to disorientation. Children with the yellow wall pre-training were more likely to attend to the yellow wall landmark than children with no pre-training. This finding demonstrates that children, like animals, can be given experience that supports the integration of landmarks into their search behavior following disorientation, even though they would not use the landmark spontaneously. However, there are a number of caveats to strong interpretations of this study. First, many of the children were at or near 5 years of age, and therefore may have begun the process of acquiring relevant spatial language. Second, the target location was always at the yellow wall. This design raises the possibility that children restricted their choices to the two geometrically appropriate corners and then selected the one that was ‘at the yellow wall,’ without truly integrating the spatial relation between the yellow wall and the target object.

Both children and animals are substantially more successful at using surface color, surface markings, or objects as direct landmarks – indicating the location at which the object is hidden – than as indirect landmarks – indicating a location a certain distance and direction from the hidden object (Biegler and Morris, 1996, Lee et al., 2006, Nardini et al., 2008). The advantage of direct over indirect landmark use holds for spatial tasks other than disorientation (Acredolo, 1978, Bushnell et al., 1995, Sutton, 2006). For example, when 12-month-old children had to retrieve an object hidden in an array of cushions, one of which had distinctive properties, they successfully retrieved the object when it was hidden under the distinctive cushion but not when it was hidden elsewhere (Bushnell et al., 1995). Likewise, 2-year-old children given a touch-screen search task found a cartoon character when he was hidden behind a distinctive item on the screen, but not when he was hidden behind one of several identical items distinguishable only by the neighboring pictures (Sutton, 2006). The vulnerability of indirect landmark representations has also been documented in much younger children using an anticipatory looking method (Lew, Foster, & Bremner, 2006).

Navigation by landmarks calls on cognitive and neural processes distinct from those used for navigation according to the geometry of the surrounding layout. Geometric relations are learned easily by many species (e.g., Tommasi & Thinus-Blanc, 2004), whereas learning of landmarks is more effortful and vulnerable to interference (Knierim, Kudrimoti, & McNaughton, 1995). In rats, learning of environmental geometry is supported by the hippocampal formation: the firing fields of cells in the hippocampus, attuned to the rat’s position, change when the lengths of the walls are altered (Tommasi & Thinus-Blanc, 2004), but not when each wall of the environment undergoes dramatic changes in color, texture, and composition while retaining its distance and direction relative to the animal (Lever, Wills, Cacucci, Burgess, & O’Keefe, 2002).

Like children and animals, human adults encode environmental geometry more readily and automatically than environmental landmarks. When adults must remember and relocate an object while navigating through a virtual environment, they automatically encode the position of the object relative to the shape of extended surfaces that form borders of the surrounding layout (Doeller & Burgess, 2008), as do rats (O’Keefe & Burgess, 1996). Adults encode the object’s position relative to a stable landmark object as well, but landmark encoding is demanding of attention and subject to interference (Doeller & Burgess, 2008) and depends on neural structures that are distinct from those that encode environmental boundaries (Doeller, King, & Burgess, 2008; see also Sutton, Joanisse, & Newcombe, 2010). Furthermore, people with Williams Syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by impaired spatial cognition, show reduced activity in the hippocampus, and they fail to use the geometry of the space in the classic reorientation task when no landmark is present (Lakusta, Dessalegn, & Landau, 2010). However, they are able to solve the task when a landmark is present, suggesting that the genetic deficit selectively impairs use of geometry. Collectively, these findings provide evidence that navigating by landmarks is typically more fragile than navigating by the layout of extended surfaces.

In contrast to animals and children, human adults use indirect landmarks frequently to locate objects, whether they are oriented or disoriented. In the red wall disorientation task that Hermer and Spelke’s 18–24 month-old children failed, adults robustly succeed (Hermer & Spelke, 1996). The transition to mature performance in this paradigm occurs between 5 and 7 years of age (Hermer-Vasquez et al., 2001). Four lines of evidence suggest that this developmental change depends, in some way, on language.

First, verbal interference decreases disoriented adults’ accuracy at locating an object in relation to an indirect landmark; adults continue to rely on geometry in a rectangular room, but are impaired at distinguishing the correct corner from the opposite one (Hermer-Vasquez et al., 1999, Ratliff and Newcombe, 2008b; note that spatial interference also impairs performance, Ratliff & Newcombe, 2008b). Interestingly, verbal interference does not impact adults’ performance in a large room, where children also succeed (Hupbach, Hardt, Nadel, & Bohbot, 2007), and its effect is smaller when the task is explained to the participants in advance, allowing them to focus attention strategically (Ratliff & Newcombe, 2008b). Second, children’s success on disoriented search tasks is correlated with productive use of spatial language, specifically the phrases ‘left of X’ and ‘right of X’ (Hermer-Vasquez et al., 2001, Shusterman and Spelke, 2005). Third, linguistic encoding is instrumental in supporting children’s ability to represent left–right relations in visual memory tasks (Dessalegn & Landau, 2008; see also Haun et al., 2006). Finally, adults with less than full linguistic input, who show limitations in their mastery of left–right spatial language, also show impaired performance on the reorientation task despite otherwise normal trajectories of cognitive maturation and experience (Pyers et al., 2010).

Some researchers have questioned the claim that language supports spatial reorientation. In the Williams Syndrome population, neither comprehension nor production of left and right correlated with the ability to solve the task, suggesting that spatial language alone cannot enhance spatial performance in people with severely impaired spatial abilities (Lakusta et al., 2010). Additionally, there is controversy over why the correlations with linguistic ability or the effects of verbal shadowing disappear in a large room rather than a small one (Hupbach et al., 2007). Nevertheless, the findings that left–right language is strongly tied to performance on the task in a small-room setting are robust and replicated across age groups (children and adults), labs, and language groups (spoken English, Nicaraguan Sign Language), despite the fact that the boundary conditions of these effects are not completely understood.

If language fosters spatial development, how might it do so? One family of hypotheses proposes that language can serve as a medium for combining information from domain-specific reasoning systems (Carruthers, 2005, Spelke, 2003). Navigation tasks highlight the limited combinatorial capacities of untrained animals and young children, who readily represent object concepts like red wall and geometric relational concepts like left of the short wall, but not concepts that span these domains, such as left of the red wall. On these views, learning the relevant vocabulary and syntax underlying a phrase like “left of the red wall” allows a child to combine the geometric concept left with the object concept red wall. The consequence of this new, unitary representation is an ability to flexibly orient by anything that could stand for X in the phrase “left of X.”

On its strongest version, the linguistic combination hypothesis predicts that the two parts of language important for landmark use in reorientation are spatial vocabulary and syntax, which provides a framework to link concepts from distinct cognitive domains. Accordingly, in the absence of mastery of spatial expressions involving the terms left and right, untrained children tested in a range of environments should not be expected to succeed on using a landmark during reorientation.

There are at least three other roles that language could play in landmark use following disorientation. First, language might boost the salience of the landmark and guide attention to relevant landmarks. Relatedly, language might provide an economical description of the environment and thereby improve memory for landmark–target relations. In either of these cases, simply saying “red wall” should help the child to attend to and remember the red wall landmark. Alternatively, language might lead the child to construe the landmark in a new way, as a pointer to another location rather than solely as an object in its own right. The studies presented here investigate each of these possible roles for language in the development of spatial cognition.

Our research focuses on 4-year-old children, who have repeatedly been shown to fail to use landmarks as indirect cues in disoriented search tasks (Hermer-Vasquez et al., 2001, Learmonth et al., 2002, Lee et al., 2006) but are on the cusp of the age where children succeed (Hermer-Vasquez et al., 2001, Shusterman and Spelke, 2005) and are well advanced in acquiring their native language. We reasoned that such children would understand a variety of verbal descriptions and may be prepared to learn to the use landmarks during disorientation, but they would not use indirect landmarks spontaneously. The linguistic context in which the search task took place was varied across these studies to see whether particular properties of language could tip the scales toward success on this task.

Linguistic context was manipulated using verbal expressions that varied in their informativeness and their linguistic structure. Experiments 1 and 2 presented a spatial expression that mentioned wall color but lacked the critical words left and right: “I’m hiding it at the red wall.” Experiment 3 presented non-spatial language that mentioned the color of the landmark wall: “Look at the pretty red wall! I’m hiding it over here.” Experiment 4 presented non-spatial but task-relevant language that mentioned wall color: “The red wall can help you get the sticker.”

The pattern of findings across these conditions should serve to test each of the four potential effects of language on navigation. First, if language exerts its effect by helping children attend to and remember the relevant wall color, then all of the cues should be beneficial. This finding would suggest that the activation of the phrase “red wall” is a sufficient condition for success. Second, if language prompts the child to construe the landmark as a pointer to the hiding location, then any task-relevant language (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) should be more helpful than mere reference to the landmark (Experiment 3). This pattern of results would suggest that the benefit is constrained by whether the linguistic structure of the cue causes the landmark wall to be construed as relevant for the spatial behavior. Third, if specifically spatial language, but not other language, enables the child to incorporate the landmark into spatial behavior, then spatial expressions (Experiments 1 and 2) should help most of all. Finally, if left–right language is the only kind of language that can support success on this task, then none of these cues should enhance children’s performance, since none of them present spatial expressions using the words “left” or “right”.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 88 4-year-old children (mean 4;3; range 3;11–4;8) who came into our laboratory with their parents. Parents provided informed consent in accordance with university IRB standards. Participating families received a small toy and a $5.00 travel reimbursement.

Apparatus

The apparatus (a rectangular room 1.2 m × 1.8 m) followed the parameters described by Hermer and Spelke, 1994, Hermer and Spelke, 1996. The apparatus was enclosed in a sound-proof environment with symmetrically placed lights of

Overview and methods

Experiment 1 tested the effect of a richly informative expression that focused on a spatial aspect of the hiding location without using the words “left” or “right.” Sixteen 4-year-old children (seven girls, nine boys; mean age 4;4; range 4;1–4;6) participated in the experimental condition. A separate group of 16 children (nine girls, seven boys, mean age 4;5; range 4;2–4;8) participated in the control condition.

Overview and methods

Sixteen 4-year-old children (ten girls and six boys; mean age 4;4; range 3;11–4;8) participated in Experiment 2. On Cue trials, children heard the same cue that was used in Experiment 1: “I’m hiding it at the red wall” or “I’m hiding it at the white wall.” The Cue trials were given in Block 1 and the No-Cue trials in Block 2.

If the effect of language was local to every trial, then the cue benefit should stop once the cue is no longer given. On the other hand, if language affects the child’s

Overview and methods

Experiment 3 tested whether the verbal description enhanced children’s search in Experiments 1 and 2 by enhancing their attention to or memory for the landmark object. To test these possibilities, the experiment used the method of Experiment 1 with a new environment (a gray room with a single red wall), and a new verbal description, designed to call children’s attention to the landmark without providing specifically spatial information about it. Sixteen 4-year-old children (nine girls and seven

Overview and methods

Experiment 4 tested whether verbal descriptions enhance children’s navigation by landmarks by providing children with information about landmark’s spatial position, as in Experiments 1 and 2, or with information about the relevance of the landmark to the navigation task. 24 4-year-old children (10 girls and 14 boys; mean age 4;2; range 3;11–4;6) who had not participated in the previous experiments were tested. On each Cue trial in Block 2, the experimenter said “The red wall can help you get

General discussion

The present studies demonstrate that a brief and simple verbal expression promotes 4-year-old children’s use of a landmark to search for a hidden object after disorientation. This finding marks the first intervention in the child reorientation literature, using the classic set-up – a small, rectangular arena, in which children typically use geometry but not landmarks – that rapidly and dramatically switches children’s performance from failure to success with a simple cue and without any

Acknowledgements

We thank Sarah Goodin, Jessica Ernst, and Kimberly Gutowski for assistance with data collection. We also thank Susan Carey, Laura Lakusta, Nora Newcombe, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. Supported by NIH Grant HD23103 to E.S.S. and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to A.S.

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