Young children's mental representation of spatial information acquired from maps.

Abstract

Two sets of experiments investigated the ability of children ages 4 to 7 to acquire information about the spatial location of several l and marks from a map. The first set of experiments demonstrated that children could acquire from a map a mental representation that included information about the relative positions among a set of l and marks. All 6- and 7-year-olds and many 4- and 5-year-olds could learn the layout of a large playhouse composed of six adjoined rooms by memorizing a map. Children who learned the map before entering the playhouse more quickly learned a route through it than children who were not exposed to the map. In a follow-up experiment preschoolers learned a map of a space that contained six spatially separated small rooms within one large room. Children could therefore view the entire configuration of smaller rooms as they traveled around the larger room. Preschoolers performed much better in this configuration than in the large playhouse. The second set of experiments investigated the ability of children and adults to acquire information about distances from maps. Subjects were asked to memorize a map that showed the location of six toy animals (or six household objects for adults) and were then asked to reconstruct in a large room the configuration that was depicted on the map. This task required that subjects represent mentally information about the distance between the l and marks. One l and mark was always placed in the correct position in the room before subjects were asked to reconstruct the configuration. Most children and all adults were able to reproduce the configuration. However, children were much more variable in their placements of l and marks than adults. Subsequent analyses indicated that a substantial portion of the variability in children's placements was attributable to variation in the choice of scale at which they reproduce the configuration. Children were less likely than adults to adopt the scale specified by the one animal that was always fixed in the room. Nevertheless, that children were able to reproduce the configuration as a whole indicated that they acquired from the map information about distances between the l and marks.