Children's Understanding of Topological Relations

A core aim of developmental cognitive science is to uncover the basic building blocks of human thought. For instance, work revealing that even young children, adults without formal education, and distant animal species are sensitive to basic Euclidean properties indicates that humans may be endowed with some primitive understanding of Euclidean geometry. But what about other forms of geometry? Here, we explore children's sensitivity to topological spatial forms. We show that children, like adults, spontaneously distinguish and match items in accordance with their topological relations. As well, we show that children's judgments about object similarity are remarkably consistent with adults', indicating stability in object concepts throughout the lifespan. Finally, we compare children's sensitivity to various topological forms with their sensitivity to geometric properties like curvature, perpendicularity, and symmetry, and find that while there is some variability in performance across all the features tested, overall performance for geometric vs. topological is comparable. Collectively, these findings suggest that even young children have an intuitive understanding of topological relations and suggest that topological relations may be among the building blocks of human visuospatial representation.