Shape But Not Color Facilitates Two-Year-Olds’ Search Performance in a Spatial Rotation Task

Children younger than 3 years of age often fail to track hidden objects that are rotated together with identical hiding containers, which might be due to relatively complex paradigms. We examined whether 2-year-olds (N = 28) are already able to track spatial rotations (i.e., by 90° and 180°) if the task is facilitated by increasing the visual discriminability of the hiding containers by means of different shapes and different colors. Children performed above chance level in all conditions except for the condition in which containers had the same color and shape and were rotated by 180°. Moreover, children found the hidden object more often when the containers had different—as compared to identical—shapes, whereas performance was similar when the containers had the same or different colors. Furthermore, their performance was better after 90° rotations than after 180° rotations and children in all conditions showed an inhibition bias. Our findings suggest that 2-year-olds are already able to track spatial rotations if the task is kept simple and focuses solely on the ability of interest. In addition, young children use shape—rather than color—as a salient dimension in spatial rotation tasks.