Learning to live in the spatial world: Experience-expectant and experience-dependent input

Abstract

The core challenge in the study of cognitive development is to specify what infants bring to the task of learning, and how inborn biological processes interact with environmental input to propel change, often extending through childhood and adolescence. Ideally, we would delineate not only the typical developmental trajectory for important lines of development, but also the drivers of that trajectory, and how variation in those drivers leads to variation across children, families, communities, and cultures, and differences among adults in their patterns of skills. One of the chief challenges to achieving these goals is the difficulty of specifying relevant environmental input. This article considers how to assess input in spatial development, including for object-centered spatial skills, navigation, and learning fundamental geometric concepts, such as shape and angle. There is good evi that both experience-expectant and experience-dependent input matters, but a detailed and specific account of these processes is a task for the future.