Mapping at the Age of Three

Jim Blaut's Youngest Mappers: Children's Geography and the Geography of Children

“…The aerial photo studies provided further evidence that the early development of spatial cognition cuts across cultural boundaries, and that children who are barely verbal, just past the age of three, can express their spatial cognition in non-verbal terms. The Texas and Mexico results showed that pre-school children could solve navigation problems on pre-assembled models, but that their own model constructions were less ''realistic'' than those we had obtained in Massachusetts (Blaut and Stea 1974). Replication attempts with pre-schoolers in the UK in the end were not very successful.…”

Natural Mapping

“…Toy-play behaviour was studied in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds under testing conditions which controlled for the influence of language (and thus avoided the danger of confusing linguistic and spatial modelling abilities) and made no use of drawing; 3-year-olds were able to construct realistic though simple macroenvironmental maps out of toys and the performance by the 4-and 5-year-olds was so similar to that of the 3-yearolds that we could not see clear evidence of developmental change after the age of 3 (Blaut and Stea, 1974). More complex macroenvironmental modelling was observed in older children (Stea, 1976a(Stea, , 1982Hart, 1979).…”

“…So the first theoretical argument is that a mapping-like activity, playing with miniature landscapes consisting of toy-signs and seen from above, is crucial in macroenvironmental learning and explains, in an immediate sense, the precocious ability of 3-5-year-old children to read air photos and solve mapping problems presented in toy and air-photo form. That the pattern emerges at ages well below three (3:0) seems confirmed (if only weakly) on several grounds: first, the fact that it is well-developed at the age of 3 (Blaut and Stea, 1974), manifesting itself at that age in macroenvironmental toy-play behaviour which a child cannot fully verbalize and which appears not to improve significantly in the fourth and fifth years, is suggestive of a long prior development; secondly, informal supportive evidence was obtained in observation of a few 2-year-olds; and thirdly, considerable research on toy play by other investigators, with other research problems in mind, provides supporting evidence because much of the toy-play observed in these studie was, indeed, modelling of places (Erikson, 1937;Lowenfeld, 1938).…”

“…We did not make use of methodologies involving free drawing by children (except in the experimental first-grade curriculum reported in Muir, 1970;also, see Hart, 1979), because we assumed from the start that differences in motor skills and eye-hand coordination would mask differences in cognitive ability. (Our toy-play protocol in the studies reported in Blaut and Stea, 1974, was used partly to avoid the use of a drawing protocol.) Therefore, we did not investigate the much-discussed tendency of young children to draw houses and like features as though seen from the side.…”

From Soul to Psyche: Historical Geographies of Psychology and Space

“…Terms such as`stream of consciousness',`looking forward to', and`the back of my mind' are among the dozens of spatial and topographical metaphors that turn up in psychological writings about the self and the social environment (Gentner and Grudin, 1985). More directly, behavioural geographers exploring child development in the 1970s and 1980s were keen to demonstrate that space and place are fundamental aspects of children's knowledge acquisition (Blaut and Stea, 1971;1974;Downs, 1985;Matthews, 1984). This work forged a research programme that united geography and cognitive psychology.…”