Abstract
This longitudinal study investigated how large-scale spatial representation changed
between the age of 4 and 6
years old. Fifteen children were asked to describe their
route home from the nursery school once a year, for three
years. Their spatial “Frames of Reference” (FoR) and point of view as indices of a spatial representation were
inferred from their spontaneous gestures and speech produced during the route description.
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Analysis of children’s utterances and gestures showed that the mean length of utterance, speech time, and use of
landmarks or right/left terms to describe a route, all
increased with age. When children were 4 year
s old, most of
them made gestures aligned with the actual route
to their homes, and their hands tended to be raised above the
shoulder. In contrast, as a 6-year-old, gestures were used to give directions that did not match the actual route
, as
if the children were creating a virtual space in front of themselves. They also tended to produce more gesture-
units and to use a smaller gesture space than when they were younger. These results indicate that the development
of FoR in preschool age
may change from an egocentric FoR to a fixed FoR. The fixed FoR is based on external
landmarks as a reference point. Moreover, some 5- and 6-year-olds depicted their
routes as a map on the floor,
which can be considered to represent survey mapping.
This study suggests that when children are 4 years old, they have a predominantly topological route representation
but that by the time they are 5 and 6 years old, they also
have a coordinated survey-type representation. This
implies that a coordinated representation is available earlier than Piaget argued. Factors underlying the
development of spatial representation such as verbal encoding skills and the commuting experience were also
discussed
