Age and sex differences in children’s spatial search strategies

Spatial Language and Children’s Spatial Landmark Use

“…Children's searches were also related to gender, such that on average girls (M = 8.13, SE = 1.62) searched closer to the center of the landmark arrays than did boys (M = 13.20, SE = 1.61), F(1, 66) = 4.95, P = .03, η 2 = .07. This was in contrast to the findings of Spetch and Parent [14] showing an advantage for boys in a similar search task. Future research should further investigate the role of gender in children's search strategies.…”

“…Our findings regarding experimenter-provided spatial language cues provide a possible explanation for why previous studies have shown differing results regarding children's ability to use multiple landmarks [2,[13][14][15][16]. Whereas some studies show that children can use the middle relation to find a hidden object by four or five years of age [2,15], other studies show that children at these ages do not always use a middle search strategy when other methods of solving the task are possible [16].…”

“…Using landmarks relationally requires calculating the location of an object in relation to multiple referents, a task that, like other relational tasks in the preschool years [10][11][12], poses a greater challenge to children than locating an object in regard to a single referent. Typically, children do not use multiple landmarks to find a hidden object until well into their preschool years [13][14][15]. However, there is debate regarding at what age children acquire the ability to do so [15,16].…”

Solving for two unknowns: An extension of vector-based models of landmark-based navigation.

“…tasks that require the solution of two utiknowns via vector algebra. Together with extant evidence that the behavior of pigeons (Spetch, Rust, Kamil, & Jones, 2003;Sturz & Katz, 2009), nutcrackers (Kamil & Jones, 1997,2000, rats (Btown & Terrinoni, 1996), gerbUs (Collet, Cartwright, & Smith, 1986), dogs (Fiset, 2009), human children (Spetch & Parent, 2006), and adults (Spetch, Cheng, & MacDonald, 1996;Spetch et al, 1997) are capable of leaming complex spatial relationships (for reviews, see Brown, 2006;Cheng & Spetch, 1998;Spetch & Kelly, 2006), the current results add to growing evidence that complex spatial relationships are teamed during navigation and that the leaming of such complex spatial relationships can be understood via vector-based models of navigation. Regardless of whether or not the unique demands of navigation fashioned these actual vectorbased representational and computational cognitive abilities to cope with the numerous and often complex spatial relationships that exist in nature, vector-based models of navigation appear to be viable approaches to understanding complex spatial behavior.…”

Children’s reasoning about spatial relational similarity: The effect of alignment and relational complexity

“…At 4 years of age, children are successful in differentiating between two identical objects by their relation to a nearby landmark (being close or far), a platform's edge (next to it or in the middle of the platform), and a platform edge's length (at the shorter edge or at the longer edge) (Vasilyeva, 2002). However, at the same age, they fail when they need to encode a hiding container in relation to two other containers in the array-one identical to the hiding container and one unique, which could potentially be used as a landmark (Lee, Shusterman, & Spelke, 2006), but children can learn through repeated trials that a reward is always hidden in the middle of two landmarks (Simms & Gentner, 2008;Spetch & Parent, 2006;Uttal, Sandstrom, & Newcombe, 2006). Hence, it appears that 4-year-olds readily encode the location of a hiding place in relation to a single landmark but still have great difficulty in encoding location in terms of two relations.…”