Research on animals, infants, children, and adults provides evidence that distinct cognitive systems underlie navigation and object recognition. Here we examine whether and how these systems interact when children interpret 2D edge-based perspectival line drawings of scenes and objects. Such drawings serve as symbols early in development, and they…

Navigational and reaching spaces are known to involve different cognitive strategies and brain networks, whose development in humans is still debated. In fact, high-level spatial processing, including allocentric location encoding, is already available to very young children, but navigational strategies are not mature until late childhood. The…

Geometrical concepts are critical to a host of human cognitive achievements, from maps to measurement to mathematics, and both the development of these concepts, and their variation by gender, have long been studied. Most studies of geometrical reasoning, however, present children with materials containing both geometric and non-geometric…

Proponents of the geometric module hypothesis argue that following disorientation, many species reorient by use of macro-environment geometry. It is suggested that attention to the surface layout geometry of natural terrain features may have been selected for over evolutionary time due to the enduring and unambiguous location information it…