Extinção espacial em crianças de diferentes idades

Abstract

Experimental evidence suggests that insects, and in particular ants, rely on spatial cues to travel along large distances when searching for food. In a study that served as a model for the present research, Wehner e Srivinasan (1981) showed that when placed in an unknown context, desert ants (Cataglyphis Formicidae, Hymenoptera) did not travel in a random fashion. In fact, these insects spend most of their time in places where the likelihood of finding food or the nest is more likely: ants searching for food show a pattern of exploration with recurrent oscillations toward the goal. In the present research with children from 6 to 12 years of age, our purpose was to measure behavioral patternsin a situation of spatial extinction and evaluate their degree of similarity to those of the ants in Wehner and Srivinasan’s study. Our procedure involved the children’s respondingwith a computer mouse toward a stimulus displayed on the screen. First, during seven observation trials, the children were supposed to click on a specific location to make a coin appear at this location. Then a 3-min test phase (i.e., extinction) started. During this phase the coin did not appear anymore and the children’s mouse clicks had no programmed consequences. The results obtained during extinction suggest that younger children (from 6 to 7 years of age) respond in a way more similar to the behavior of Wehner and Srivinasam’s ants, whereas older children (from 10 to 12 years of age) follow systematic patterns of exploration that are more in line with the geometric properties of the border of the monitor than with the spatial localization of the target.