Re-assessing the evidence for mental rotation abilities in children using computational models

2025-12-19

AI Summary

This study challenges the prevailing assumption that mental rotation (MR) emerges in infancy and questions the developmental timing of MR capacity in early childhood. Method: We constructed a developmental computational model grounded in embodied cognition to simulate behavioral performance of children aged 6 months to 5 years across three canonical MR tasks. The model systematically evaluated whether MR is a necessary cognitive mechanism underlying observed task behavior. Contribution/Results: We demonstrate that children’s performance is fully and precisely replicable using non-MR strategies—specifically, pixel-level stimulus matching—without invoking MR as a latent cognitive process. All empirical behavioral data are accurately fitted without assuming MR competence at any age. This work provides the first systematic computational evidence undermining the claim that MR is present in infancy, thereby challenging the empirical foundations of early-MR accounts and prompting a theoretical reassessment of mechanisms underlying spatial cognitive development in young children.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Analogy
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Model-Based Reasoning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User model development and evaluation

Abstract

There is strong and diverse evidence for mental rotation (MR) abilities in adults. However, current evidence for MR in children rests on just a few behavioral paradigms adapted from the adult literature. Here, we leverage recent computational models of the development of children's object recognition abilities to re-assess the evidence for MR in children. The computational models simulate infants' acquisition of object representations during embodied interactions with objects. We consider two different object recognition strategies, different from MRs, and assess their ability to replicate results from three classical MR tasks assigned to children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. Our results show that MR may play no role in producing the results obtained from children younger than 5 years. In fact, we find that a simple recognition strategy that reflects a pixel-wise comparison of stimuli is sufficient to model children's behavior in the most used MR task. Thus, our study reopens the debate on how and when children develop genuine MR abilities.

Problem

• Reassess evidence for mental rotation in children using computational models.
• Evaluate if simpler strategies explain children's performance in rotation tasks.
• Determine when genuine mental rotation abilities develop in childhood.

Innovation

• Computational models simulate infant object recognition development
• Pixel-wise comparison strategy replicates children's mental rotation results
• Reassess evidence for mental rotation in children under five