Children's spatial activities and parental spatial talk were measured to examine their associations with variability in preschoolers' spatial skills (N = 113, Mage = 4 years, 4 months; 51% female; 80% White, 11% Black, and 9% other). Parents who reported more diversity in daily spatial activities and used longer spatial talk utterances during a…

Ninety-seven children aged 4-11 (49 males, 48 females, mostly White) were given the opportunity to improve their problem-solving performance by devising and implementing a novel cognitive offloading strategy. Across two phases, they searched for hidden rewards using maps that were either aligned or misaligned with the search space. In the second…

Although much is known about adults' ability to orient by means of cognitive maps (mental representations of the environment), it is less clear when this important ability emerges in development. In the present study, 97 seven- to 10-year-olds and 26 adults played a video game designed to investigate the ability to orient using cognitive maps. The…

Notwithstanding its well-established role on high-demanding spatial navigation tasks during adulthood, the effect of field dependence-independence during the acquisition of spatial navigation skills is almost unknown. This study assessed for the first time the effect of field dependence-independence on topographical learning (TL) across the life…

This study took a novel approach to understanding the role of language in spatial development by combining approaches from spatial language and gesture research. It analyzed forty-three 4.5- to 6-year-old's speech and gesture production during explanations of reasoning behind performance on Spatial Analogies and Children's Mental Transformation…

Infants require locomotor experience to behave adaptively at a drop-off. However, different experimental paradigms (visual cliff and actual gaps and slopes) have generated conflicting findings regarding what infants learn and the specificity of their learning. An actual, adjustable drop-off apparatus was used to investigate whether learning to…

Three experiments examine 18- to 24-month-old (N = 78) toddlers' ability to spatially orient objects by their major axes for insertion into a slot. This is a simplified version of the posting task that is commonly used to measure dorsal stream functioning. The experiments identify marked developmental changes in children's ability to preorient…

Two experiments examined infants' ability to form a spatial category when habituated to few (only 2) or many (6) exemplars of a spatial relation. Sixty-four infants of 10 months and 64 infants of 14 months were habituated to dynamic events in which a toy was placed in a consistent spatial relation ("in" or "on") to a referent…

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children's (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity.…

We investigated infants' sensitivity to spatiotemporal structure. In Experiment 1, circles appeared in a statistically defined spatial pattern. At test 11-month-olds, but not 8-month-olds, looked longer at a novel spatial sequence. Experiment 2 presented different color/shape stimuli, but only the location sequence was violated during test;…

Examines the relationship between young children's spatial exploration and their cognitive representations of environments. Children ages 20-28 months and 36-44 months explored a museum room; measures of the quantity and mode (active versus passive) of their exploration were recorded. Results indicate individual differences in the extent to which…

Two experiments tested the effectiveness of familiar size as information for perceiving distance. In the first experiment, under monocular viewing conditions, adults judged the distances to large and small photographs of faces and to large and small checkerboard ovals equal to the faces in size. In the second, the same displays were presented to…

The locative categories--"in,""above,""below," and "beside"--were investigated to determine whether their exemplars were organized according to the prototype distinction. (RH)

Results of 3 experiments indicated that 12 month olds, but not 8 and 10 month olds, looked longer at objects of a different shape from test objects than at the test objects. Twelve month olds recognized rectilinear, but not curvilinear, forms. They recognized differences in forms for three-dimensional, but not two-dimensional, objects. (BC)

Examined the behavior of 8.5-month-old crawling infants and 14-month-old walking toddlers in ascending and descending sloping walkways. Both groups overestimated their ability to ascend slopes. Toddlers hesitated most before descending 10 and 20 degree slopes, whereas infants hesitated most before descending 30 and 40 degree slopes. (MDM)