Young Children's Representation of Spatial Information Acquired From Maps

The early development of the ability to acquire integrated knowledge of a space from a map was investigated in 130 children, 4 to 7 years of age. Experiment 1 demonstrated that all 6- and 7-yearolds 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, and older children performed significantly better than younger children. In Experiment 2 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 significantly better in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1, and the majority of them performed perfectly or almost perfectly. Taken together; the findings help to clarify young children's map-reading abilities in several respects and suggest that preschoolers' abilities are more substantial than has been assumed or demonstrated previously. The use of maps in research on spatial cognition has waxed and waned. Maps figured in an early wave of investigations when researchers (e.g., Piaget, Inhelder, & Szeminska, 1960) believed that children's construction of maps and model layouts could provide valid replicas of children's mental representations of a space. But the use of maps declined when it became clear that children with equal representations might produce quite different maps because of differences in their ability to draw in general and to construct maps specifically (Kosslyn, Heldmeyer, & Locklear, 1977; Siegel, 1981).