Original Communication Ready-Made and Self-Made Facilitation Effects of Arrays Priming and Conceptualization in Children’s Visual Memory Christiane Lange-Küttner 1,2 1 London Metropolitan University, London, UK, 2 Universität Konstanz, Germany Swiss Journal of Psychology, 69 (4), 2010, 189–200 DOI 10.1024/1421-0185/a000023 Abstract. The study investigates the relationship between array priming and the self-generated conceptualization of arrays in spatial memory. Nursery and primary school age children and adults (N = 70) were tested with an object and place memory reaction-time/accu- racy task, once first using a frame (containment and figurative thought) and (in another session) using a grid (explicit boundaries around places). They were also given the Common Region Test (CRT) with which drawing of object-place vs. object-region binding was tested. Object memory was better than place memory in 5-year-olds, but place memory had caught up in older children. Ten-year-olds showed already an accuracy comparable to young adults, and they also remembered places somewhat better and faster than object shapes. Experiencing the explicitly denoted places in the grid in the first session improved place memory in the second session with the frame, but not vice versa. Object-place binding in the CRT predicted better object than place memory, while object-region binding predicted place memory equal to or better than object memory. These binding strategies statistically eliminated the array priming effects of the grid, showing a trade-off between “self-made” spatial encoding strategy and priming with a “ready-made” spatial array structure. Keywords: cross-domain cognition, drawing development, spatial concepts, visual memory development, object-place binding, object- region binding The Swiss psychologists Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder (1956; Piaget, Inhelder, & Szeminska, 1960) provided the most influential theoretical account of the development of spatial concepts in children. The present study used a com- bination of two methods in a within-subjects design – vis- ual memory and drawing – to investigate whether Piaget and Inhelder’s theory of the development of spatial con- cepts applies across these two domains (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The specific goal of the study was to ascertain whether encoding of object-place binding versus object-re- gion binding in a drawing task predicts object versus place memory in a computerized spatial memory task. In short, a qualitative change was assumed by Piaget and Inhelder inasmuch as children conceptualize space initially as (1) containment and (2) neighborhood relations of fig- ures, that is (1) figures could be “inside,” “outside,” or on the boundary of an area; and (2) figures A and B could be in a spatial relation to one another, but a third figure C could “take away” space if placed in between – hence no conser- vation of distance would occur. Because figures are so cen- tral to this early concept of space, Piaget and Inhelder (1971) also termed the underlying process of this early ap- proach figurative thought (see also the review in Lange- Küttner, 2000, 2008a; Lange-Küttner & Reith, 1995). In a qualitative change, older children’s spatial concept no longer depends on figures; instead, they construct a coor- dinate spatial axes system. Objects can be inserted posthoc into this vectorial space, but they do not define space. Crit- icism of Piaget and Inhelder’s theory concerned mainly the developmental sequence, as children and adults alike ap- peared to use both types of concepts, often also called to- pological and Euclidian (Liben, 1988; Mandler, 1988; Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1992). Both spatial categories and fine-grained spatial resolution are used depending on the task affordances rather than according to development with age (Liben, 1982, 1988; Mandler, 1988; Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1992, 2003; Newcombe & Liben, 1982; Sandberg, Huttenlocher, & Newcombe, 1996). Spatial Encoding in Drawing Development Nevertheless, Piaget and Inhelder’s theory proved to hold in a very literal sense in research on children’s drawings. In- deed, young children draw objects in implicit space, that is, in empty space without explicit denotation of spatial rela- tions, before they commence drawing explicit spatial axes Swiss J. Psychol. 69 (4) © 2010 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern