Space perception in children

A spatial transformation task was administered to two groups of
children under one of three conditions: active subject-movement,
passive subject-movement and stimulus array-rotation. In the younger
group (5-7 years) subjects did significantly better in the active
subject-movement than in the array-rotation condition. The active-passive
distinction was not significant. Performance improved
significantly with age. While there were no statistically significant
differences between conditions in the older group (8-9 years), a trend
toward reversal in level of difficulty between the array-rotation and
subject-move conditions was noted. These findings were related to
possible differences between young, pre-operational children who depend
on topological cues and a stable relationship between the stimulus and
the external background context and older, concrete operational children
for whom spatial concepts are internalized such that actual movement
might compete with imagined movement. Significant sex differences,
favoring boys, emerged in the older group.

The effect of stimulus plane orientation (horizontal vs
vertical) on mirror-image oblique discrimination was
investigated for children 5 to 8 years of age. A
significant difference in learning rate favoring the
vertical plane presentation was obtained. Tracing the
stimuli had no effect on learning rate in either the
horizontal or vertical plane. The results were explained
in terms of egocentricity in the child's representation of
spatial relations.