Switching between the Forest and the Trees: The Contribution of Global to Local Switching to Spatial Constructional Abilities in Typically Developing Children

Abstract

Background: Spatial analysis encompasses the ability to perceive the visual world by arranging the local elements ("the trees") into a coherent global configuration ("the forest"). During childhood, this ability gradually switches from a local to a global precedence, which contributes to changes in children's spatial construction abilities, such as drawing or building blocks. At present, it is not clear whether enhanced global or local processing or, alternatively, whether switching between these two levels best accounts for children's spatial constructional abilities.

Methods: We assessed typically developing children 7 to 8 years old on a global/local switching task and on two widely used spatial construction tasks (the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure and the Block Design test).

Results: The ability to switch from global to local level, rather than a global or a local advantage, best accounted for children's performance on both spatial construction tasks.

Conclusions: The present findings contribute to elucidate the relationship between visual perception and spatial construction in children showing that the ease with which children switch perception from global to local processing is an important factor in their performance on tasks requiring complex drawing and block assembling.

Keywords: Block Design test; Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure; block assembly; drawing; global/local perception; visual processing; visuospatial abilities.

Figure 1

Experimental design. Trial sequence and experimental conditions. Participants were required to indicate whether a circle or a square was present. Target figures were presented at the global (large shape) or local (small shapes) level. Each trial was organized in pairs (local–local, LL; global–global, GG; global–local, GL; local–global, LG). In each pair, circles and squares were at the same (congruent pairs) or opposite (incongruent pairs) level of spatial analysis. As such, each pair fell into a 2 × 2 factorial design for global or local level, congruent and incongruent pairs.

Figure 2

Top left panel: Regression plots of the Rey–Osterrieth Complex Figure with global to local switching accuracy (ACC-GL). Bottom panels: Regression plots of the Block Design with global to local switching accuracy (ACC-GL) and reaction times (RTs-GL).

Figure 3

Global/local switching task. Accuracy and RTs, separately for females and males in the four experimental conditions: global–global, GG; local–local, LL; local–global, LG; global–local, GL. Boxes represent 25 and 75 percentiles. The solid line inside the box represents the median of the group, while the empty square in the box represents the mean. Bars above and below the boxes represent the interquartile range. Each individual dot represents a subject.