Dataset Information

Four-Year-Olds Use a Mixture of Spatial Reference Frames.

ABSTRACT: Keeping track of unseen objects is an important spatial skill. In order to do this, people must situate the object in terms of different frames of reference, including body position (egocentric frame of reference), landmarks in the surrounding environment (extrinsic frame reference), or other attached features (intrinsic frame of reference). Nardini et al. hid a toy in one of 12 cups in front of children, turned the array when they were not looking, and then asked them to point to the cup with the toy. This forced children to use the intrinsic frame (information about the array of cups) to locate the hidden toy. Three-year-olds made systematic errors by using the wrong frame of reference, 4-year-olds were at chance, and only 5- and 6-year-olds were successful. Can we better understand the developmental change that takes place at four years? This paper uses a modelling approach to re-examine the data and distinguish three possible strategies that could lead to the previous results at four years: (1) Children were choosing cups randomly, (2) Children were pointing between the egocentric/extrinsic-cued location and the correct target, and (3) Children were pointing near the egocentric/extrinsic-cued location on some trials and near the target on the rest. Results heavily favor the last possibility: 4-year-olds were not just guessing or trying to combine the available frames of reference. They were using the intrinsic frame on some trials, but not doing so consistently. These insights suggest that accounts of improving spatial performance at 4 years need to explain why there is a mixture of responses. Further application of the selected model also suggests that children become both more reliant on the correct frame and more accurate with any chosen frame as they mature.

SUBMITTER: Negen J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4489865 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Four-Year-Olds Use a Mixture of Spatial Reference Frames.

Negen James J Nardini Marko M

PloS one 20150702 7

Keeping track of unseen objects is an important spatial skill. In order to do this, people must situate the object in terms of different frames of reference, including body position (egocentric frame of reference), landmarks in the surrounding environment (extrinsic frame reference), or other attached features (intrinsic frame of reference). Nardini et al. hid a toy in one of 12 cups in front of children, turned the array when they were not looking, and then asked them to point to the cup with t ...[more]

PMID: 26133990

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Project description:Primates rely predominantly on vision to gather information from the environment and neurons representing visual space and gaze position are found in many brain areas. Within the medial temporal lobe, a brain region critical for memory, neurons in the entorhinal cortex of macaque monkeys exhibit spatial selectivity for gaze position. Specifically, the firing rate of single neurons reflects fixation location within a visual image (Killian et al., 2012). In the rodents, entorhinal cells such as grid cells, border cells, and head direction cells show spatial representations aligned to visual environmental features instead of the body (Hafting et al., 2005; Sargolini et al., 2006; Solstad et al., 2008; Diehl et al., 2017). However, it is not known whether similar allocentric representations exist in primate entorhinal cortex. Here, we recorded neural activity in the entorhinal cortex in two male rhesus monkeys during a naturalistic, free-viewing task. Our data reveal that a majority of entorhinal neurons represent gaze position and that simultaneously recorded neurons represent gaze position relative to distinct spatial reference frames, with some neurons aligned to the visual image and others aligned to the monkey's head position. Our results also show that entorhinal neural activity can be used to predict gaze position with a high degree of accuracy. These findings demonstrate that visuospatial representation is a fundamental property of entorhinal neurons in primates and suggest that entorhinal cortex may support relational memory and motor planning by coding attentional locus in distinct, behaviorally relevant frames of reference.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The entorhinal cortex, a brain area important for memory, shows striking spatial activity in rodents through grid cells, border cells, head direction cells, and nongrid spatial cells. The majority of entorhinal neurons signal the location of a rodent relative to visual environmental cues, representing the location of the animal relative to space in the world instead of the body. Recently, we found that entorhinal neurons can signal location of gaze while a monkey explores images visually. Here, we report that spatial entorhinal neurons are widespread in the monkey and these neurons are capable of showing a world-based spatial reference frame locked to the bounds of explored images. These results help connect the extensive findings in rodents to the primate.

Dataset Information

Four-Year-Olds Use a Mixture of Spatial Reference Frames.

Publications

Four-Year-Olds Use a Mixture of Spatial Reference Frames.

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