Pointing to preschool children's spatial competence: A study in natural settings

Conning, Alison M.; Byrne, Richard W.

doi:10.1016/s0272-4944(84)80032-8

Cited by 21 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Spencer, Blades and Morsley, in their 60 JAMES M. BLAUT important book The child in the physical environment (1989), review much of this research and concur with us that young children can indeed engage in sophisticated mapping behaviour. Indirect support for or vertification of our findings is also to be found in Landau and Spelke's (1985) and Landau's (1986) studies of map-use by blind and sighted 4-year-olds, Siegel and Schadler's (1977) study of cognitive mapping by kindergartners, Blades and Spencer's (1986) study of map-use by 4-year-olds, Conning and Byrne's (1984) study of map-use by 3-and 4-year-olds, Presson's (1982) of map-use by 5-year-olds, Ottosson's (1988), also by 5-year-olds, Matthews' (1984aMatthews' ( , 1984bMatthews' ( , 1985, by children aged 6 to 11. ('Map-use' in all these studies is fairly simple.)…”

Section: Empirical Evidence Of Early Mapping In Childrensupporting

confidence: 84%

Natural Mapping

Blaut¹

1991

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. ABSTRACT This essay describes a theory of mapping behaviour and proposes a number of concrete techniques, grounded in this theory, to improve the way we teach young children about mapping and geography. Mapping behaviour is carried out by all human beings of all ages in all cultures; it is a natural ability, related to the language acquisition ability. If we teach formal map skills and geography to elementary school and preschool children in ways that develop their own natural mapping behaviour, we will significantly improve children's learning of these and cognate subjects.

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Section: Empirical Evidence Of Early Mapping In Childrensupporting

confidence: 84%

Natural Mapping

Blaut¹

1991

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

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“…In contrast, the majority of four-year-old children were more likely to point to the absolute location of rooms on the same floor and just over half of them pointed to the absolute location of rooms on another floor. Conning & Byrne, 1984), it would be interesting to replicate the present study in an unfamiliar space, to see if the same results are obtained. In other words, by four years of age children are able to conceptualize rooms as if they are objects or locations (see DeLoache (1987) a similar argument about children's interpretation of models).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 66%

“…Conning & Byrne, 1984) and less likely that children's responses would be masked by stress due to the experimental context (Newcombe & Learmonth, 1999). Note that by using a familiar location, we have made it more likely that children had developed and would express their survey knowledge (cf.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Survey representations preserve the distance and bearing relationships between landmarks and places and, like cartographic maps, may represent the configuration of landmarks and places as if seen from above. In support of this idea, preschool children can conceptualize their own homes in terms of survey representations before they can do so with novel space (Conning & Byrne, 1984). Other theories suggest that perceptual processes allow extraction of invariant spatial relations after exploration and interaction from different vantage points (Heft, 1996).…”

Section: Development Of Spatial Knowledgementioning

confidence: 98%

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Developing spatial localization abilities and children's interpretation ofwhere

2008

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Two-year-old children often start asking questions with where. In this study we test whether children understand where to mean route or absolute location and whether the size of the space or elevation made a difference. Previous research has documented developmental changes over the preschool years in children's non-verbal spatial reasoning. Forty-eight children between two and five years of age were interviewed. We asked them to point in response to where questions about an object, rooms on the same floor and on a different floor. All children pointed to the location of the hidden objects. The youngest children pointed to the route to rooms while the oldest children were more likely to point to the location of rooms. With age, the children gradually used more spatial location terms than deictic terms in response to where. These results suggest that children's meaning of where initially differs for different sized spaces and developmental changes reflect non-verbal cognition.

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“…For instance, Conning and Byrne (1984) showed that children [3][4] years old are able to acquire Euclidean mental representations of familiar environments, especially when familiarity is brought about through self-exploration. In studies of children, but less frequently in studies of adults, subjects have been tested in small-scale spaces, like rooms, and the acquisition of the representation has been carefully controlled.…”

Section: Content and Properties Of Cognitive Maps Although There Hasmentioning

confidence: 99%