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

Groups of 8-, 11- and 19-year-olds were tested in two unfamiliar environments. The street system consisted of straight-line routes that generally ran at right angles to one another in the ‘grid’ environment, but not in the ‘curved’ environment. In Expt 1, subjects rode in an automobile through the environments three times, and made bearing and distance estimates to target locations after each trip. The results showed that performance was equivalent across the types of environments (i.e. grid vs. curved), and that only 8-year-olds were unable to integrate target information. There was an increase in accuracy over successive trials at each age level on the bearing measure, and Expt 2 suggested that this increase was due to repeated environmental trips rather than to successive recall of target locations. These results indicate that young children cannot readily integrate spatial information in a very large, unfamiliar environment. However, their accuracy does improve as they become increasingly familiar with the environment.