تحقیق توانبخشی افراد با نیاز های خاص

The study is a commentary on the research of Cooper, Uller, Pettifer and Stole (Acta Paediatrica 2009). Cooper et al found that 6 - to 7-year-olds attentinal system appeared to be more supported by fewer changes and longer durations of views on a deading aloud teacher. Lange-Küttner suggests that future research might test (1) the left-right bias rather than up-down or widening of attention, as this is a crucial parameter in spatial cognition and ADHD disorder, (2) the contingency of view and 

sentence complexion of the filmed speaker.

Introduction

The study of Cooper, Uller, Pettifer and Stole (1) showedthat 4-year-old children’s visual attention was supported bywatching an experimentally designed television clip, whichhad many different views onto a ‘teacher’ reading from apicture book. However, 6- to 7-year olds’ attentional systemappeared to be more supported by fewer changes and longerdurations of views on the reading-aloud teacher.This is not only of interest to paediatricians and parentsas well as children’s television programme directors, butalso a new and exciting research paradigma where two tra-ditions within developmental psychology have been linked,i.e. viewing and attention. In my commentary, I am describ-ing the background to children’s viewing of multiple visualscenes with regard to attentional load. I begin with a briefreview of the earliest systematic research on view process-ing in children, the Three Mountains task, and continuewith the possible cognitive and neuropsychological back-ground behind view processing.Children’s viewing of visual scenes was part of the Swisspsychologists Piaget’s and Inhelder’s research on the devel-opment of spatial reasoning (2). Their Three MountainsTask had become a well-researched paradigm in the 1980sand is part of nearly every developmental psychology text-book. Children were asked to decide from the four views ofthe Three Mountains array, which would be the one of th experimenter, i.e. they were tested whether they could iden-tify the perspective of somebody else (Fig. 1).Most children could do this only at about age nine, withthe advent of operational thought (executive skills). Before,they would often select their own perspective instead. Now-adays, we could call this perseveration, but then it wascalled egocentrism. Only at about age eleven did childrenshow the same performance level as undergraduate students(3).Earlier age thresholds could be found when geometricallyregular blocks, rather natural objects like mountains withan irregular contour were used and it was revealed that alsothe overlap of the mountains was posing a difficult problem(4). An information processing perspective was proposedvery early by Rosser (5) who sorted the task demands suchas number of views and recognition vs. reproduction asresponse into some sort of a logical sequence. She statedwith great foresight that ‘when the task is beyond the repre-sentational and conceptual abilities of the young child, theybehave egocentrically either because the internal relation-ships are most salient, or because they do not know what todo’ (Rosser, 1983, p. 666). In other words, the own-viewperspective is just the most familiar, so they may fall backon what they know. Perseverative responses in the most dif-ficult task, requiring children to reconstruct the view fromready-made object shapes, occurred in 56 % of the 4-yearolds, 48 % of the 6-year olds and still in 39 % of the 8-yearolds, i.e. all these children were constructing their own viewinstead of the other’s view. A recent study of myself (6) used a series of four views ofspatial systems into which children had to draw figuresplaying a ball game. Children initially do not draw views atall, but only single objects without a spatial context. Hence,the ready-made views presupplemented their objects with asurrounding. Most 7-year-old children were drawing ahabitual figure size and did not reduce size in perspectivesystems, but some benefited from the perceptual pull cre-ated by gradually emerging depth in one of the series with-out actually being aware of it. However, a random sequenceof these views where depth would not gradually unfold didnot have the same effect until 2 years later. Hence, the expe-rience of multiple views could have an impact on 7-yearolds when their sequence corresponded to the perceptualflow. This underpins the finding of Cooper et al. that theexperience of a higher amount of views had a beneficialeffect on children’s attentional skills.So if the experience of multiple views is beneficial, whywould children return to their own view when their infor-mation processing capacity was challenged in the ThreeMountains Task? Response perseveration is an importantproblem, and could be demonstrated already in infancy inanother well-researched Piagetian spatial task, the A-not-Bsearch task (7–10).