Spatial cognition and scale: A child's perspective

Scale is an essential component in geographic and spatial cognition. Spatial cognition in spaces of different size, or scale, relies on qualitatively different information. In order to provide empirical evidence for differences between spaces of different size a controlled experiment was conducted comparing a large, environmental space with a small, desktop space. Two groups of children (7 and 9 years of age) and one group of adults participated in the study. Each participant experienced one of the two experimental spaces, all participants completed the same set of tasks. Two location recall tasks were completed, as was a spatial description task. Location recall consisted of learning an array of five objects in one of the two experimental spaces and performing two reconstruction tasks. The first reconstruction task was a 'landmark free' location recall task, which required participants to place one of the five objects (arbitrarily chosen) in the location it occupied during the learning episode. This was followed by a 'relative' location recall task, which required participants to place as many of the remaining four objects (from the learning episode) back in the experimental space. Both object identity and location recall were recorded over five trials (five distinct arrays of objects). In the second phase of the experiment participants described an array of five objects in the same space in which the reconstruction task had been completed. Participants' use of frames of reference while describing spatial location, orientation and arrangement was recorded to indicate mechanisms for the encoding and recall of spatial location in different size spaces. The availability and use of local and permanent frames of reference appear to facilitate location recall in the absence of proximal landmarks in large spaces. Relative location recall improves with age and is better in large, environmental spaces. This pattern is supported by both increased accuracy in location recall (landmark free recall in particular) and the structure and completeness of verbal descriptions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd.