Dr. Jodie Plumert

One of the major problems confronting us as we operate in everyday life is keeping track of and communicating about where things are. To effectively remember and communicate about the vast number of locations around us, we need some kind of scheme for organizing spatial information. Our work on spatial cognition focuses on two fundamental organizational processes for structuring spatial information: 1) forming spatial categories, and 2) nesting smaller spatial units within larger ones.

Spatial categories are formed by clustering locations that fall within a bounded area or near a salient landmark. For example, we might think of a telephone, stapler, book, and a pen as belonging together because they are located on a desk. Spatial units are nested by encoding the hierarchical spatial relations that hold between progressively larger landmarks and spatial regions. For example, a telephone might be known as on a desk in an office in the psychology building. Together, these two organizational processes provide structure to the spatial world around us.

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Moving the self in relation to other objects is a central problem faced by children and adults alike. We cross traffic-filled roads, walk along crowded sidewalks, and catch fast-moving balls. On the perceptual side, this requires learning to perceive information specifying relevant properties of the environment (speed, distance, angle). On the motor side, this requires learning to control critical components of the movement (posture, balance, force). But adaptive movement within the environment involves more than just perceiving the relevant information or controlling physical movement – one must also synchronize motor movements with perceptual information. When crossing busy roads, for example, motor movements must be closely timed to perceptual information specifying the speed and distance of the traffic. To date, much of the work on perceptual-motor development has focused on infancy and toddlerhood because this is when visual perception and motor skills are undergoing dramatic change. Our work, however, clearly shows that perception-action coupling continues to undergo change even in late childhood and early adolescence. This is particularly obvious when children and adolescents are faced with the problem of coordinating the movement of a complicated mechanical device (e.g., a bike or car) in relation to other fast-moving objects in the environment.

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