Young Children's Ability to Infer Spatial Relationships: Evidence from a Large, Familiar Environment

Abstract

Young (mean age = 3-9) and old (mean age = 5-0) nursery school children were tested on their ability to infer spatial relationships in a large, familiar environment. Each child in the younger group was matched to a child of the same sex in the older group who had been attending the nursery school for the same number of months. Subjects were taken to 3 different locations in their nursery school and were asked to point to 5 targets on the school grounds. Older children were more accurate than younger children on nursery school targets, but children's spatial representations were relatively nonintegrated at both age levels. Consistent sex differences in favor of males were discussed in the context of a new framework that could potentially explain the appearance of sex differences on spatial tasks conducted in large-scale environments. It was concluded that very young children have difficulty inferring spatial relationships, even in a large, familiar environment. This difficulty seems to be due to a relative lack of symbolic capacity.

Blind and Sighted Children's Spatial Knowledge of Their Home Environments

“…Sighted children of ve and six years of age readily pointed in straight-line directions to the unseen locations. This nding is supportive of the results of other studies with sighted children which used similar procedures (Conning & Bryne, 1984;Herman, Shiraki, & Miller, 1985). Blind children, however, tended to point to the routes taken to the locations rather than to where the locations were relative to their current positions.…”

Children's and adults' cognitive maps of very large unfamiliar environments

“…Mohr et al, 1975;Hazen et al, 1978;Hazen, 1982)1 It seems reasonable to suggest that this discrepancy is due to the large size of the space utilized in this study in comparison with the earlier studies. has argued that the size of the test space may profoundly affect the pattern of developmental differences found on spatial tasks because more information must be integrated as spatial size increases (see also Anooshian & Siegel, 1985;Herman et al, 1985). It is not surprising, therefore, that Anooshian & Nelson (1985) recently found developmental differences even in lo-I2-year-olds' ability to coordinate spatial information from a very large environment.…”

Words and maps: developmental changes in mental models of spatial information acquired from descriptions and depictions

“…Young children's representations are often based on the serial order in which information is acquired. For example, young children's representations of large‐scale environments tend to be sequential in nature (Allen & Kirasic, 1985; Herman, Shiraki & Miller, 1985; Piaget, Inhelder & Szeminska, 1960; Siegel & White, 1975). These representations capture the serial order in which landmarks or routes are experienced but they may not encode the spatial relations among locations, particularly if the locations were not experienced together on a route.…”