When people are asked to judge the distance between 2 points, they may produce systematic over-or underestimations. Their judgments may also show asymmetries, as when, for example, people estimate the distance from their house to a mailbox as different from the distance from the mailbox to their house. It has been argued that such errors show that spatial representations are fundamentally nonmetric. In 3 experiments, however, the authors show that these effects can be explained by a category-adjustment (CA) model of spatial coding, in which coding is hierarchical (i.e., occurs at more than one level of measurement, with estimates based on combination across levels). In this model, coding at each level is uncertain but not distorted. Experiment 1 shows that, in a carefully controlled experimental setting, the CA model can be used to predict under-or overestimations of distances with respect to objective standards. Experiments 2 and 3 show that, when people learn maps, the CA model correctly predicts patterns of asymmetries in estimation.

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In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.