Mental Space in Memory through Adversarial Collaboration: Exploring the Origins and the Developmental Course – SPACEODC

2025 – 2029

Humans tend to spontaneously use space in order to think, externally represent (e.g., calendars), and even talk about a variety of non-spatial domains (e.g., time). The general consensus is that mentally spatializing information constitutes a functional feature of working memory, whereby any ordinal/serial information is coded within a spatial framework. However, while developmental studies suggest that this ability might be innate, continuous throughout development, and tied to biological and evolutionary factors, studies on adults suggest that it begins late in life following instruction, and that it is entirely limited to attentional biases dictated by cultural practices. By associating two researchers with opposite views in an adversarial collaboration, the goal of this project is to bring together competing theories in order to create a unified, comprehensive description of humans’ ability to use a mental space for actively representing and retrieving sequential information, from birth and across the lifespan. Through studies in human newborns, infants, and adults, we will shed light into the origins, developmental course, and functional properties of this ability, asking whether it is functional from birth, how it is modulated throughout the first years of life, what are its behavioral signatures and underlying biases, and whether and how this ability impacts learning across different domains of information across the lifespan. The findings from this project will have critical implications for theoretical models of learning and memory across the lifespan and have practical applications at both the educational and rehabilitation levels.

Project supported by