Cognitive processes in spatial mapping: Evidence from a developmental spatial deficit

ABSTRACT

We report a case study of an adolescent girl (N.K.Y.) with a developmental deficit affecting spatial processing. In a simple spatial mapping task, N.K.Y. shows a striking dissociation: She succeeds in one variant of the experiment in which the stimuli are objects, but struggles in a structurally identical task with people as stimuli. We present evidence that this dissociation stems from a tendency to automatically adopt the spatial perspective of other people, but not objects—a phenomenon also observed in neurotypical individuals. When adopting another person’s perspective, N.K.Y. imagines herself in the other’s position, representing the other’s left and right as if it were her own. N.K.Y.’s deficit in relating left–right information to her own body then disrupts her performance. Our results shed light on the nature of N.K.Y.’s deficit as well as the cognitive operations involved in spatial perspective taking.

KEYWORDS:

• Perspective taking
• developmental deficit
• spatial compatibility

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Kristen Johannes and members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Johns Hopkins for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. We are especially grateful to N.K.Y. and her mother for their patience and good humour throughout the study. It was a pleasure to collaborate with both of them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This arrangement ensured that the intrinsic left and right sides of the source and target models were not in conflict with their left and right sides relative to N.K.Y., as would have been the case if the models were facing N.K.Y. For example, if the target model had faced N.K.Y., the target’s right hand would have been on the left relative to N.K.Y., and the target’s left hand would have been on the right.

2. In a second modification of the chairs mapping task, the chairs were in the same positions as in Experiment 1b (in front of N.K.Y., as in Figure 3) but she was prevented from viewing source and target chairs simultaneously. On each trial, the target chair was occluded by a blanket while N.K.Y. viewed the stimulus marker on the source chair. N.K.Y. then put on a blindfold, and the occluder was shifted from the target chair to the source chair, following which N.K.Y. removed the blindfold and made her response. She performed extremely well in this task, with no difference between congruent and incongruent trials [100% and 91% (1 error), respectively, Fisher’s exact test: p = .5], suggesting that the inability to see both source and target at the same time is not responsible for her poor performance in Experiment 3.

3. We do not assume that N.K.Y. necessarily uses the linguistic labels “left” and “right” in representing the sides of the sources and targets (or other stimuli). The representations distinguishing left and right may be non-linguistic spatial representations.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by funding from the Johns Hopkins Science of Learning Institute.