Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more…

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.…

Two experiments investigated the role of spatial prototypes in estimates of location. Found that adults and children ages 7 to 11 years overestimated distances between target locations in different regions and that none displaced objects toward the region centers. Even with boundaries removed during testing, adults and children overestimated…

Examined development of infants' relational coding in spatial orientation problems. Found that 6-month-olds performed poorly in a peekaboo task in which they had to turn to a target after displacement to a novel position and direction. Twelve- month-olds solved the tasks whether or not target was located between two landmarks; 8.5-month-olds…

In order to determine whether non-Western children would show a memory deficit for contextually organized spatial ability, the performances of 30 Mayan and 30 American nine-year-olds on reconstruction of an organized three-dimensional miniature scene were examined. (MP)

This study explored the structure of verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory in children between ages 4 and 11 years. Multiple tasks measuring 4 different memory components were used to capture the cognitive processes underlying working memory. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the processing component of working memory…

Examined in 4 experiments 3- and 4-year-olds' ability to communicate about containment and proximity relations. Found that when describing where a toy mouse was hidden, children were more likely to successfully disambiguate a small landmark when it was in, rather than next to, the large landmark. Three-year-olds initiated searches faster when the…

A total of 20 children with idiopathic precocious puberty; 27 adolescents with clinically delayed puberty; and an equivalent number of controls matched for sex, age, and IQ were given a battery of tests including measures of verbal and spatial abilities and a task using a dichotic listening procedure to assess hemispheric lateralization.…

Results showed that the performance of the suburban and urban 10-year-olds on a Piaget-based map drawing task did not differ significantly, while the Appalachian children performed significantly better than one or both of the other groups on three out of the four spatial concepts. (JMB)

Compares 27 children with early onset diabetes (EOD) with 24 children with late onset diabetes (LOD) and 30 sibling controls in performance on tests of intellectual functioning and school achievement. Results revealed that duration of illness, age of onset, and hypoglycemic convulsions significantly predicted spatial ability. (Author/RWB)

Examined the relationship of environmental input to cognitive growth in language, spatial operations, concepts, and associative memory in children tested four times six months apart and differing in the amount of school input received. Found that children made greater growth over periods with greater amounts of school input for language, spatial…