Children's ability to bind and maintain colour-location conjunctions: The effect of spatial language cues

Abstract

Sixty 4-year olds were shown a target square, divided in half by colour, and, after a one-second delay, were asked to find an identical square in a test array. Seven to 10 days later, control children (N = 19) completed the same task again; one experimental group heard a descriptive spatial language cue when shown the target (e.g. "yellow is on the top") (N = 21) and the other heard and verbalised the same cue (N = 18). Spatial language cues significantly improved the performance of both experimental groups when compared to the control group, but this was dependent on children demonstrating knowledge of the spatial language terms used. Verbalising a linguistic cue yielded no additional benefit over just hearing a linguistic cue. The current results suggest that hearing a spatial language cue encourages children who have an understanding of spatial language terms to change from a visual to a verbal strategy to encode colour-location feature conjunctions in visual stimuli.