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Preschool and elementary-school children from the United States and Israel represented depth relations in pictures. A lateral bias to place near objects on the left side appeared in English and Hebrew readers of all ages and in older Arabic readers; this bias is consistent with left-right asymmetries observed in Western art. The overall directionality of notational systems was seen as constraining, but not causing, the left bias. In all cultural groups, young children represented near-far by horizontal alignments and older children, by diagonal alignments, with virtually no vertical alignments. Front-behind representations followed a different developmental course that was interpreted as due to efforts to convey nearness between the items separated in depth.

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