Relatively few studies have directly examined children's memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to…

Performance on a range of spatial and mathematics tasks was measured in a sample of 1592 students in kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade. In a previously published analysis of these data, performance was analyzed by grade only. In the present analyses, we examined whether the relations between spatial skill and mathematics skill differed…

Spatial abilities--required in both academic and everyday information processing--are recommended as an important target for explicit instruction in the K-12 curriculum. However, most school curricula do not address this spatial issue, probably because spatial ability is a general rather than domain-specific skill and also due to debate regarding…

The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the…

A total of 120 children between four to eight years of age were administered four sets of visual perspective-taking tasks. Results supported the hypothesis that children's task competence would be a fraction of the number and type of spatial relationships embedded in the stimulus displays. (Author/MP)

Elementary school students (N=144) determined which set of pictures looked to them the way a set of blocks looked to a second observer from different perspectives. Results indicated that correct spatial judgments were facilitated when a landmark was present. (Author/DB)

The LOGO programing language developed for children includes a set of primitive graphics commands that control the displacement and rotation of a display screen cursor called a turtle. The purpose of this study was to examine 4- to 7-year-olds' understanding of single turtle commands as transformations that connect turtle states and to…

In four experiments, three, four, and five year olds were successful in solving perspective-taking problems when they were asked what object occupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer. Results indicated developmental change in several important aspects of spatial performance. (BC)

Second- and fourth-grade children viewed a cylindrical object in nine positions and identified the 90- , 180- , or 270-degree positions from a set of photographs. Perspectives in which the object differed from the child's view in both left-right and near-far dimensions were more difficult than perspectives that only transformed one dimension.…

The effects of training on first, third, and fifth graders' spatial perspective taking with multiobject two-dimensional arrays were assessed in two studies. Found that, on an immediate test of retention, performance was significantly better for those subjects trained with feedback present than for nontrained students. (MDM)

Results of two experiments support the finding of developmental change in the role of representation in perspective-taking tasks. Experiment 1, which involved 80 first-grade students with a mean age of 6.5 years, crossed task characteristics and response modes. Subjects either imagined an observer's movement around a fixed array or imagined an…

The effects of age, task, and egocentric responding on visual-spatial perspective taking were studied among 41 preschool children between 3.0 and 5.9 years of age. Children were individually administered three perspective-taking measures: the upside-down/right-side-up task, a block task, and a picture box task, all previously described in the…

Tested children's ability to compute perspectives from locational and structural descriptions of scenes. Children from 4 to 10 years of age were given perspective-taking problems that involved abstract multicomponent scenes; responses entailed the reconstruction of alternate views. Four-year olds were unsuccessful; 10-year olds were successful…

In order to determine whether egocentrism can be conceptualized as a unitary construct, 100 children (51 four-year-olds, 37 five-year-olds, and 12 six-year-olds) were administered a visual/spatial perspective task, a cognitive/communicative task, and an affective task. All tasks were designed to measure different facets of egocentrism. The 50…