Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Chimpanzees, monkeys and rats are disoriented, they reorient themselves using geometrical features of their environment (Tinkelpaugh, 1932; Cheng, 1986; Margules & Gallistel, 1988) In rats this ability appears to be modular, impervious to nongeometric information (e.g. distinctive colors and odors) marking important locations (Cheng, 1986; Margules & Gallistel, 1988) I tested young children and adults in an orientation task similar to that used with rats (Hermer & Speike, under revievyr) Whereas adults readily used both geometric and nongeometric information to orient themselves, young children, like rats, used only geometric information. These findings provided the first evidence that humans, like many other mammals , orient by using environmental shape; that the young child's orientation system, like that of rats, is informationaily encapsulated (Fodor, 1983); and that in humans the apparent modularity of this system is overcome during development