- Email: [email protected]
Preschoolers use maps to find a hidden object outdoors
ARTICLE IN PRESS
Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 341–345 www.elsevier.com/locate/yjevp
Preschoolers use maps to find a hidden object outdoors David Steaa,, Dennis D. Kerkmanb, Marites F. Pin˜onc, Nancy N. Middlebrookd, Jennifer L. Riced a
Center for Texas-Mexico Applied Research, Southwest Texas State University-San Marcos, 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX 78666, USA b Park University, USA c The Psychological Corporation, USA d Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA Accepted 15 May 2004
Abstract This study investigated the ability of preschool children to use a planar map of a 50 m2 area to find a hidden object. Thirty-two 3 512-year olds were asked to find a toy hidden in an open field. Independent of age, children who had the map found the object significantly more often than those who did not. The results are consistent with universal mapping theory in that preschool-aged children used a two-dimensional planar, scale map to find a hidden object in an open, unbounded, outdoor environment. Girls significantly outperformed boys in locating the target object, but this is appears to have been due to differences in willingness to comply with instructions, rather than differences in spatial abilities. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction The ability to locate places and things in the environment—safe and dangerous places, locations of food, water, shelter, etc.—is critical for the survival of all animals. Humans have used map-like models to depict space and presumably, to find things for at least 8000 years (Mellaart, 1963; Delano Smith, 1987). When, in the course of ontogeny, do humans first develop this ability to use maps? Piaget and Inhelder (1967) suggested that children must achieve the formal operational skill of proportional reasoning before they can understand maps as scale models of space. Liben and Downs (1989) reported that young children ‘yshow precisely the same kinds of problems with map comprehension that one would predict from Piagetian theory’ (p. 191). Uttal (1996) found that 4- and 5-year olds had difficulty reconstructing scalar aspects of object locations learned from a Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-512-245-7975; fax: +1-512-2458353. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Stea).
0272-4944/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.05.003
map, arguing that map tasks involving many spatial relations place too great a load on preschool-aged children’s memory. In contrast, Huttenlocher, Newcombe, and Vasilyeva (1999) showed that most 3- and 4-year olds can locate an object hidden in a narrow rectangular box after being shown a picture of a narrow rectangle with a dot indicating the hidden object’s location in the box. To reconcile their findings with prior research, Huttenlocher et al. (1999, p. 397) proposed: ythat location in closed spaces is special in that it can be established by relating visible distances to one anothery If infants and toddlers can code location only by relating present distances to one another in this way, the early ability to establish location should be restricted to enclosed spaces and should not extend to tasks involving distal landmarks, because imposed measurement units must be used to establish distances in such cases. More recently, Sandberg and Huttenlocher (2001) found that 5- and 6-year olds were able to navigate an
ARTICLE IN PRESS D. Stea et al. / Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 341–345
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enclosed environment too large to be viewed at once (hallways of an unfamiliar school), using a map to form routes from starting to endpoints shown only on the map. Blaut and Stea’s universal mapping theory (Blaut, McCleary, & Blaut, 1970; Blaut & Stea, 1971; Blaut, 1991; Stea, Blaut, & Stephens, 1996; Blaut, Stea, Spencer, & Blades, 2003) proposes that map use is a pan-cultural universal, and that ability to read and use maps develops much earlier than other theories lead one to expect. Map use requires the ability to engage in three transformations from the perspective of ordinary ground-based perception: mental rotation to the vertical, diminution in scale, and reduction from three dimensions to two. A child who uses a map must have a rudimentary mastery of these three cognitive skills. The present study explores the lower limit of children’s map-use by examining children 2 years younger than Sandberg and Huttenlocher’s (2001), using a map of an unbounded space too large to view at a single glance. 1.1. Sex differences in spatial reasoning and map use Most undergraduate developmental psychology textbooks make rather sweeping generalizations about sex differences in spatial skills. For example, Boys outperform girls on tests of visuo-spatial abilities—that is the ability to draw inferences about or otherwise manipulate pictorial information (Shaffer, 1999, p. 467). However, Sandberg and Huttenlocher (2001) found no sex differences in their study of 5- and 6-year-olds’ ability to use maps to navigate in a large, enclosed environment. Their results are consistent with the findings of Blaut et al. (1998), who found no sex differences in spatial cognition among children aged 3–5 in the USA, the UK, Mexico, Iran, and South Africa, in tasks involving aerial photographs. The aerial photos were of a portion of Sheffield, UK: thus, aerial-photo reading ability was shown not to be restricted to familiar settings. The present study extends this line of inquiry by examining sex differences in 3–5-year-olds’ ability to use maps to find an object in an outdoor setting where the spaces between landmarks are too large to allow the area to be viewed at once.
ages 3 and 4, two between 4 and 5, and one 5–3) were eliminated because they appeared not to understand the task at all. These six wandered aimlessly for at least 400 s. The 18 boys and 14 girls in the final sample ranged from 36 to 66-month olds, with a mean of 53.63 months (S.D.=8.48). 2.2. Design Eight boys and nine girls were randomly selected to be given a copy of a map of the space shown in Fig. 1. The remaining ten boys and five girls were not given the map, X2 (1, N=32)=1.25 (n.s.). Note that this map (see Fig. 1) is a standard planar projection (i.e. a ‘bird’s-eye view’), rather than the oblique projection, or child’s-eye view, used in the recent study by Plester, Richards, Blades, and Spencer (2002). 2.3. Materials/site The space where the object was hidden was a rectangular field (1650 1650 or 2/3 acre). It was a small valley containing 16 landmarks that were identified on the map that was given to the children in the experimental group (see Fig. 1): five trees, a trashcan, four cardboard boxes, a picnic table with two benches, a drainage ditch terminating in a culvert, and a manhole. The location of the hidden object was indicated by a drawing of the stuffed toy monkey that they were instructed to find (see Fig. 1). The stuffed toy was inside one of the cardboard boxes (the box it was in was varied randomly from one child to the next). The monkey was
2. Method 2.1. Participants Thirty-eight children from a university preschool participated. They were from working-class and middle-class families and included a mixture of ethnicities. Six children (one female and five males: three between
Fig. 1. A gray-scale image of the map shown to the children. The mapped segment of field was approximately 50 m2. The original map was printed on 812 in 11 in paper in color. The five trees (amorphous dark polygons) were in green; the picnic table, boxes, and toy animal were brown; the trashcan, culvert, and drainage ditch were black.
ARTICLE IN PRESS D. Stea et al. / Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 341–345
not visible from the child’s starting point. The map was given to the child so that it was oriented from the child’s point of view to the field as it lay before the child. As can be seen from Fig. 1, this means that the child must turn nearly 901 to his/her right from the starting view while keeping the map oriented in order for the map to be useful in locating the toy. 2.4. Procedures Each child was instructed to find the toy monkey that was ‘hiding’ inside one of the boxes, by showing an identical toy monkey who desired to find his ‘lost brother’. Children in the experimental group were given a map (see Fig. 1), while those in the control group were not. In both groups, all of the landmarks were pointed out to the children by the experimenter (see Appendix A for exact instructions). 2.5. Scoring All sessions were videotaped. Data were recorded by hand in the field and validated against the video recordings scored after the fact by two trained researchers. Chronological age was measured in months. We recorded which children received a map, whether or not they looked at it before or during the time that they searched for the hidden object, whether or not the child found the hidden object, and for those who did find the object, how many seconds it took them to it, measured as the time (in tenths of a second) from the video frame when the instructions were finished (‘Can you use the map to go out in the field and find my lost monkey?’) to the video frame when the child found it.
3. Results Of the 17 children who received a map, four boys referred to it while searching and the other four did not, but all nine girls referred to it, F (1, N=17)=0.59, po0:02:1 All 13 girls and boys who referred to the map found the hidden object. Of the 15 who did not get a map, only five found the object (two boys and three girls). There was a significant relation between getting a map and finding the hidden object, X2 (1, N=32)=6.03, p ¼ 0:01: Those who found the object did not differ significantly in age from those who did. The 13 who had a map found the hidden object in an average of 107.46 s (S.D.=65.36), whereas the five who found it without the map took an average of 168.4 s (S.D.=64.78), t(1.78) p ¼ 0:10 (trend). The youngest child to find the hidden 1 An accurate value of X2 could not be computed for this comparison because the ‘girls with-a-map-who-did-not-find-the-object’ cell has an expected frequency of less than 5.
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object was a 39-month-old girl who was given a map, used it, and found the hidden object in 99 s.
4. Discussion Preschoolers aged 3 512 did use maps to help them find the hidden object, even in an un-enclosed space too large for them to see at a single glance, provided that they referred to the map while searching. As was the case in Sandberg and Huttenlocher’s (2001) study with 5- and 6-year olds, the effect was so strong that statistically significant results were obtained even with a relatively small sample of preschool-aged participants. 4.1. Girls outperformed boys These results extend previous findings with respect to the absence of sex differences in preschoolers’ comprehension and use of maps: Sandberg and Huttenlocher (2001) reported no sex differences among 5- and 6-year olds in a large-scale, map-based navigation task, in an enclosed space. Neither Blaut et al. (1998) nor Plester et al (2002) found sex differences in preschool-aged children’s ability to understand maps or aerial photographs. Here, we find that among 3–5-year olds, there is a sex difference favoring girls, rather than boys. The simplest explanation for girls’ superior performance has nothing to do with sex differences in spatial skills and everything to do with a sex difference in complying with the instructions: All of the girls who got a map followed the directions: ‘yuse the map to go out in the field and find my lost monkey.’ All the girls who were given a map referred to it while searching, whereas only half of the boys who were given a map referred to it. Kerkman, Wise, and Harwood (2000) found that sex differences on a mental rotation task were restricted to the ‘impossible rotation’ problems, arguing that the sex difference is not due to spatial reasoning, but compliance, an unwillingness on the part of females to assert, ‘that’s impossible’. In this study, females were more likely to find the object because they were more likely to comply with the instructions to ‘ylook at the map and use it to find [the hidden object] [emphasis added].’ Sex differences in compliance have been found at very early ages (Fiengold, 1994; Maccoby, 1998). 4.2. Theoretical implications These results are consistent with the theory of universal mapping (Blaut, Stea, Spencer, & Blades, 2003) since they constitute further evidence that preschool-aged children can use map-like representations in macro-spatial problem solving. This theory, in turn, fits within a larger theoretical framework that hypothesizes
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D. Stea et al. / Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 341–345
that map-like modeling is a fundamental cultural–ecological adaptation to dealing with macro-environments. These results suggest that some of the constraints on map use in young children proposed by Huttenlocher et al.’s (1999) account may need to be relaxed. The 16 landmarks on the map were sufficiently distant from each other to require holding some in working memory while looking at others, then integrating them to understand the intervening distances and directions. 4.3. The process involved in preschoolers’ successful map use All of the preschoolers who referred back and forth between the field and the map while searching for the object found the hidden object. Clearly, maintaining an internal working memory of the map while looking at different aspects of the open field must be involved in solving this spatial location problem. It bears repeating that the map was a planar, rather than an oblique projection, so that the representations of the objects did not directly correspond to their shapes or angular relations as the child saw them. Thus, in accord with the fundamental tenets of universal mapping theory, effective use of the map required the mental processes of rotation to the vertical, diminution in scale, reduction from three dimensions to two, plus referring back and forth between the map and the mapped space while searching. 4.4. Implications for educational practice The crucial finding of this study is that a large number of 3–5-year olds can, without prior instruction, read and use maps. These and other recent results (e.g. Blades et al., 1998; Blaut et al., 1998; Sandberg & Huttenlocher, 2001; Plester et al., 2002) suggest that instruction in map use could be initiated at the age of 3 or 4 instead of 7 or 8, as it typically is now (e.g. National Council for Geographic Education, 1994; Texas Education Agency, 1999). Given the dearth of Americans’ basic geographic knowledge (National Geographic-Roper, 2002), the possibility of earlier initiation of classroom instruction in map use and geography should be investigated.
Acknowledgements This work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF-Geography & Regional Science #9906418; NSF-Institutional Laboratory Instrumentation Grant #DUE-9551939). The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agency. The authors wish to express their thanks to the Southwest Texas State University’s Family and Consumer
Science’s preschool, the children who participated, their parents, Allison Payton, who helped to produce the aerial photograph in Fig. 1, and our research assistants: Josh Brunotte, Alanna Carmichael, Corina Castellano, Lynn Dougherty, Vanessa Eckert, and Carley Pilgrim.
Appendix A. Instructions for the experimental and control groups For the experimental group, the instructions were: [Show child the toy monkey.] If child is a boy identify the monkey as ‘he’, otherwise as ‘she’. Say, ‘You see this monkey? I had another little monkey just like this one, but he/she got lost and I can’t find him/her. Could you help me find my lost monkey? I know that the monkey is somewhere in this field. Here’s a map of the field in front of you [show map].’ See, these are the trees [point out on the map], this is the trash can [point out on the map], these is the cardboard boxes, this is the picnic table, this is the ditch, this is that thing [the culvert], and this is the manhole cover. Can you use the map to go out in the field and find my lost monkey? [Note: Be careful not to provide cues (e.g., moving your head or eyes in the direction where the monkey is hidden).] [If the child asks for help, say, ‘I need to stay here with the lost monkey’s brother/sister. It will be more fun if you find the monkey all by yourself’.] [Trial ends when child finds monkey or gets lost (especially running off in the wrong direction).] Instructions for the control group were: [Show child toy.] Say, ‘You see this toy monkey? I had another little monkey but he/she got lost. Could you help me? I know the monkey is someplace in the field in front of you. See, these are the trees [point out to the trees in the field], this is the trash can [point out in the field], these is the cardboard boxes [point out in the field], this is the picnic table [point out in the field], this is the ditch [point out in the field], this is that thing (the culvert) [point out in the field], and this is the manhole cover. Can you go out in the field and find my monkey?’ References Blades, M., Blaut, J. M., Darvizeh, Z., Elguea, S., Sowden, S., Spencer, C., Stea, D., Surajpaul, R., & Uttal, D. (1998). A cross-cultural study of young children’s mapping abilities. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 23(n.s.), 1–9.
ARTICLE IN PRESS D. Stea et al. / Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 341–345 Blaut, J. M. (1991). Natural mapping. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16(n.s.), 55–74. Blaut, J. M., McCleary, G. S., & Blaut, A. S. (1970). Environmental mapping in young children. Environment and Behavior, 2/3, 335–349. Blaut, J. M., & Stea, D. (1971). Studies of geographic learning. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 61, 387–393. Blaut, J. M., Stea, D., Spencer, C., & Blades, M. (2003). Mapping as a cultural universal: theoretical arguments and developmental evidence. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(1), 165–185. Delano Smith, C. (1987). Cartography in the prehistoric period in the Old World: Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In Harley, J., & Woodward, D. (Eds.), The history of cartography: cartography in prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Vol. I (pp. 54–99). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fiengold, A. (1994). Gender differences in personality: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 429–456. Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial scaling in young children. Psychological Science, 10(5), 393–398. Kerkman, D. D., Wise, J. C., & Harwood, A. E. (2000). Impossible ‘‘mental rotation’’ problems: a mismeasure of women’s spatial abilities. Learning and Individual Differences, 12, 253–269. Liben, S. L., & Downs, R. (1989). Understanding maps as symbols. In Reese, H. W. (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior, Vol. 22 (pp. 145–201). New York: Academic Press. Maccoby, E. (1998). The two sexes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Mellaart, J. (1963). Excavations of Catal Huyu¨k, Anatolian Studies. Journal of the British Institute at Ankara, XIX, 17–177. National Council for Geographic Education. (1994). Geography for life: National Geography Standards 1994. https://www.ncge.org/ catalog/showProduct.cgi?everything&gst*ncge-01. National Geographic-Roper. (2002). Global geography literacy survey. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/geosurvey/highlights.html. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1967). The child’s conception of space. New York: Norton. Plester, B., Richards, J., Blades, M., & Spencer, C. (2002). Young children’s ability to use aerial photographs as maps. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 22(1/2), 29–47. Sandberg, E. H., & Huttenlocher, J. (2001). Advanced spatial skills and advance planning: components of 6-year-olds’ navigational map use. Journal of Cognition and Development, 2(1), 51–70. Shaffer, D. R. (1999). Developmental psychology (5th ed). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Stea, D., Blaut, J. M., & Stephens, J. (1996). Mapping as a cultural universal. In Portugali, J. (Ed.), The construction of cognitive maps (pp. 1–2). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kulwer Academic Press. Texas Education Agency. (1999). Texas Social Studies Framework: Kindergarten—Grade 12. http://socialstudies.tea.state.tx.us/ downloads/pdf/framework/EntireDoc.pdf. Uttal, D. H. (1996). Angles and distances: children’s and university students’ reconstruction and scaling of spatial configurations. Child Development, 67(6), 2763–2779.
Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 341–345 www.elsevier.com/locate/yjevp
Preschoolers use maps to find a hidden object outdoors David Steaa,, Dennis D. Kerkmanb, Marites F. Pin˜onc, Nancy N. Middlebrookd, Jennifer L. Riced a
Center for Texas-Mexico Applied Research, Southwest Texas State University-San Marcos, 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX 78666, USA b Park University, USA c The Psychological Corporation, USA d Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA Accepted 15 May 2004
Abstract This study investigated the ability of preschool children to use a planar map of a 50 m2 area to find a hidden object. Thirty-two 3 512-year olds were asked to find a toy hidden in an open field. Independent of age, children who had the map found the object significantly more often than those who did not. The results are consistent with universal mapping theory in that preschool-aged children used a two-dimensional planar, scale map to find a hidden object in an open, unbounded, outdoor environment. Girls significantly outperformed boys in locating the target object, but this is appears to have been due to differences in willingness to comply with instructions, rather than differences in spatial abilities. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction The ability to locate places and things in the environment—safe and dangerous places, locations of food, water, shelter, etc.—is critical for the survival of all animals. Humans have used map-like models to depict space and presumably, to find things for at least 8000 years (Mellaart, 1963; Delano Smith, 1987). When, in the course of ontogeny, do humans first develop this ability to use maps? Piaget and Inhelder (1967) suggested that children must achieve the formal operational skill of proportional reasoning before they can understand maps as scale models of space. Liben and Downs (1989) reported that young children ‘yshow precisely the same kinds of problems with map comprehension that one would predict from Piagetian theory’ (p. 191). Uttal (1996) found that 4- and 5-year olds had difficulty reconstructing scalar aspects of object locations learned from a Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-512-245-7975; fax: +1-512-2458353. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Stea).
0272-4944/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.05.003
map, arguing that map tasks involving many spatial relations place too great a load on preschool-aged children’s memory. In contrast, Huttenlocher, Newcombe, and Vasilyeva (1999) showed that most 3- and 4-year olds can locate an object hidden in a narrow rectangular box after being shown a picture of a narrow rectangle with a dot indicating the hidden object’s location in the box. To reconcile their findings with prior research, Huttenlocher et al. (1999, p. 397) proposed: ythat location in closed spaces is special in that it can be established by relating visible distances to one anothery If infants and toddlers can code location only by relating present distances to one another in this way, the early ability to establish location should be restricted to enclosed spaces and should not extend to tasks involving distal landmarks, because imposed measurement units must be used to establish distances in such cases. More recently, Sandberg and Huttenlocher (2001) found that 5- and 6-year olds were able to navigate an
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enclosed environment too large to be viewed at once (hallways of an unfamiliar school), using a map to form routes from starting to endpoints shown only on the map. Blaut and Stea’s universal mapping theory (Blaut, McCleary, & Blaut, 1970; Blaut & Stea, 1971; Blaut, 1991; Stea, Blaut, & Stephens, 1996; Blaut, Stea, Spencer, & Blades, 2003) proposes that map use is a pan-cultural universal, and that ability to read and use maps develops much earlier than other theories lead one to expect. Map use requires the ability to engage in three transformations from the perspective of ordinary ground-based perception: mental rotation to the vertical, diminution in scale, and reduction from three dimensions to two. A child who uses a map must have a rudimentary mastery of these three cognitive skills. The present study explores the lower limit of children’s map-use by examining children 2 years younger than Sandberg and Huttenlocher’s (2001), using a map of an unbounded space too large to view at a single glance. 1.1. Sex differences in spatial reasoning and map use Most undergraduate developmental psychology textbooks make rather sweeping generalizations about sex differences in spatial skills. For example, Boys outperform girls on tests of visuo-spatial abilities—that is the ability to draw inferences about or otherwise manipulate pictorial information (Shaffer, 1999, p. 467). However, Sandberg and Huttenlocher (2001) found no sex differences in their study of 5- and 6-year-olds’ ability to use maps to navigate in a large, enclosed environment. Their results are consistent with the findings of Blaut et al. (1998), who found no sex differences in spatial cognition among children aged 3–5 in the USA, the UK, Mexico, Iran, and South Africa, in tasks involving aerial photographs. The aerial photos were of a portion of Sheffield, UK: thus, aerial-photo reading ability was shown not to be restricted to familiar settings. The present study extends this line of inquiry by examining sex differences in 3–5-year-olds’ ability to use maps to find an object in an outdoor setting where the spaces between landmarks are too large to allow the area to be viewed at once.
ages 3 and 4, two between 4 and 5, and one 5–3) were eliminated because they appeared not to understand the task at all. These six wandered aimlessly for at least 400 s. The 18 boys and 14 girls in the final sample ranged from 36 to 66-month olds, with a mean of 53.63 months (S.D.=8.48). 2.2. Design Eight boys and nine girls were randomly selected to be given a copy of a map of the space shown in Fig. 1. The remaining ten boys and five girls were not given the map, X2 (1, N=32)=1.25 (n.s.). Note that this map (see Fig. 1) is a standard planar projection (i.e. a ‘bird’s-eye view’), rather than the oblique projection, or child’s-eye view, used in the recent study by Plester, Richards, Blades, and Spencer (2002). 2.3. Materials/site The space where the object was hidden was a rectangular field (1650 1650 or 2/3 acre). It was a small valley containing 16 landmarks that were identified on the map that was given to the children in the experimental group (see Fig. 1): five trees, a trashcan, four cardboard boxes, a picnic table with two benches, a drainage ditch terminating in a culvert, and a manhole. The location of the hidden object was indicated by a drawing of the stuffed toy monkey that they were instructed to find (see Fig. 1). The stuffed toy was inside one of the cardboard boxes (the box it was in was varied randomly from one child to the next). The monkey was
2. Method 2.1. Participants Thirty-eight children from a university preschool participated. They were from working-class and middle-class families and included a mixture of ethnicities. Six children (one female and five males: three between
Fig. 1. A gray-scale image of the map shown to the children. The mapped segment of field was approximately 50 m2. The original map was printed on 812 in 11 in paper in color. The five trees (amorphous dark polygons) were in green; the picnic table, boxes, and toy animal were brown; the trashcan, culvert, and drainage ditch were black.
ARTICLE IN PRESS D. Stea et al. / Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 341–345
not visible from the child’s starting point. The map was given to the child so that it was oriented from the child’s point of view to the field as it lay before the child. As can be seen from Fig. 1, this means that the child must turn nearly 901 to his/her right from the starting view while keeping the map oriented in order for the map to be useful in locating the toy. 2.4. Procedures Each child was instructed to find the toy monkey that was ‘hiding’ inside one of the boxes, by showing an identical toy monkey who desired to find his ‘lost brother’. Children in the experimental group were given a map (see Fig. 1), while those in the control group were not. In both groups, all of the landmarks were pointed out to the children by the experimenter (see Appendix A for exact instructions). 2.5. Scoring All sessions were videotaped. Data were recorded by hand in the field and validated against the video recordings scored after the fact by two trained researchers. Chronological age was measured in months. We recorded which children received a map, whether or not they looked at it before or during the time that they searched for the hidden object, whether or not the child found the hidden object, and for those who did find the object, how many seconds it took them to it, measured as the time (in tenths of a second) from the video frame when the instructions were finished (‘Can you use the map to go out in the field and find my lost monkey?’) to the video frame when the child found it.
3. Results Of the 17 children who received a map, four boys referred to it while searching and the other four did not, but all nine girls referred to it, F (1, N=17)=0.59, po0:02:1 All 13 girls and boys who referred to the map found the hidden object. Of the 15 who did not get a map, only five found the object (two boys and three girls). There was a significant relation between getting a map and finding the hidden object, X2 (1, N=32)=6.03, p ¼ 0:01: Those who found the object did not differ significantly in age from those who did. The 13 who had a map found the hidden object in an average of 107.46 s (S.D.=65.36), whereas the five who found it without the map took an average of 168.4 s (S.D.=64.78), t(1.78) p ¼ 0:10 (trend). The youngest child to find the hidden 1 An accurate value of X2 could not be computed for this comparison because the ‘girls with-a-map-who-did-not-find-the-object’ cell has an expected frequency of less than 5.
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object was a 39-month-old girl who was given a map, used it, and found the hidden object in 99 s.
4. Discussion Preschoolers aged 3 512 did use maps to help them find the hidden object, even in an un-enclosed space too large for them to see at a single glance, provided that they referred to the map while searching. As was the case in Sandberg and Huttenlocher’s (2001) study with 5- and 6-year olds, the effect was so strong that statistically significant results were obtained even with a relatively small sample of preschool-aged participants. 4.1. Girls outperformed boys These results extend previous findings with respect to the absence of sex differences in preschoolers’ comprehension and use of maps: Sandberg and Huttenlocher (2001) reported no sex differences among 5- and 6-year olds in a large-scale, map-based navigation task, in an enclosed space. Neither Blaut et al. (1998) nor Plester et al (2002) found sex differences in preschool-aged children’s ability to understand maps or aerial photographs. Here, we find that among 3–5-year olds, there is a sex difference favoring girls, rather than boys. The simplest explanation for girls’ superior performance has nothing to do with sex differences in spatial skills and everything to do with a sex difference in complying with the instructions: All of the girls who got a map followed the directions: ‘yuse the map to go out in the field and find my lost monkey.’ All the girls who were given a map referred to it while searching, whereas only half of the boys who were given a map referred to it. Kerkman, Wise, and Harwood (2000) found that sex differences on a mental rotation task were restricted to the ‘impossible rotation’ problems, arguing that the sex difference is not due to spatial reasoning, but compliance, an unwillingness on the part of females to assert, ‘that’s impossible’. In this study, females were more likely to find the object because they were more likely to comply with the instructions to ‘ylook at the map and use it to find [the hidden object] [emphasis added].’ Sex differences in compliance have been found at very early ages (Fiengold, 1994; Maccoby, 1998). 4.2. Theoretical implications These results are consistent with the theory of universal mapping (Blaut, Stea, Spencer, & Blades, 2003) since they constitute further evidence that preschool-aged children can use map-like representations in macro-spatial problem solving. This theory, in turn, fits within a larger theoretical framework that hypothesizes
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that map-like modeling is a fundamental cultural–ecological adaptation to dealing with macro-environments. These results suggest that some of the constraints on map use in young children proposed by Huttenlocher et al.’s (1999) account may need to be relaxed. The 16 landmarks on the map were sufficiently distant from each other to require holding some in working memory while looking at others, then integrating them to understand the intervening distances and directions. 4.3. The process involved in preschoolers’ successful map use All of the preschoolers who referred back and forth between the field and the map while searching for the object found the hidden object. Clearly, maintaining an internal working memory of the map while looking at different aspects of the open field must be involved in solving this spatial location problem. It bears repeating that the map was a planar, rather than an oblique projection, so that the representations of the objects did not directly correspond to their shapes or angular relations as the child saw them. Thus, in accord with the fundamental tenets of universal mapping theory, effective use of the map required the mental processes of rotation to the vertical, diminution in scale, reduction from three dimensions to two, plus referring back and forth between the map and the mapped space while searching. 4.4. Implications for educational practice The crucial finding of this study is that a large number of 3–5-year olds can, without prior instruction, read and use maps. These and other recent results (e.g. Blades et al., 1998; Blaut et al., 1998; Sandberg & Huttenlocher, 2001; Plester et al., 2002) suggest that instruction in map use could be initiated at the age of 3 or 4 instead of 7 or 8, as it typically is now (e.g. National Council for Geographic Education, 1994; Texas Education Agency, 1999). Given the dearth of Americans’ basic geographic knowledge (National Geographic-Roper, 2002), the possibility of earlier initiation of classroom instruction in map use and geography should be investigated.
Acknowledgements This work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF-Geography & Regional Science #9906418; NSF-Institutional Laboratory Instrumentation Grant #DUE-9551939). The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agency. The authors wish to express their thanks to the Southwest Texas State University’s Family and Consumer
Science’s preschool, the children who participated, their parents, Allison Payton, who helped to produce the aerial photograph in Fig. 1, and our research assistants: Josh Brunotte, Alanna Carmichael, Corina Castellano, Lynn Dougherty, Vanessa Eckert, and Carley Pilgrim.
Appendix A. Instructions for the experimental and control groups For the experimental group, the instructions were: [Show child the toy monkey.] If child is a boy identify the monkey as ‘he’, otherwise as ‘she’. Say, ‘You see this monkey? I had another little monkey just like this one, but he/she got lost and I can’t find him/her. Could you help me find my lost monkey? I know that the monkey is somewhere in this field. Here’s a map of the field in front of you [show map].’ See, these are the trees [point out on the map], this is the trash can [point out on the map], these is the cardboard boxes, this is the picnic table, this is the ditch, this is that thing [the culvert], and this is the manhole cover. Can you use the map to go out in the field and find my lost monkey? [Note: Be careful not to provide cues (e.g., moving your head or eyes in the direction where the monkey is hidden).] [If the child asks for help, say, ‘I need to stay here with the lost monkey’s brother/sister. It will be more fun if you find the monkey all by yourself’.] [Trial ends when child finds monkey or gets lost (especially running off in the wrong direction).] Instructions for the control group were: [Show child toy.] Say, ‘You see this toy monkey? I had another little monkey but he/she got lost. Could you help me? I know the monkey is someplace in the field in front of you. See, these are the trees [point out to the trees in the field], this is the trash can [point out in the field], these is the cardboard boxes [point out in the field], this is the picnic table [point out in the field], this is the ditch [point out in the field], this is that thing (the culvert) [point out in the field], and this is the manhole cover. Can you go out in the field and find my monkey?’ References Blades, M., Blaut, J. M., Darvizeh, Z., Elguea, S., Sowden, S., Spencer, C., Stea, D., Surajpaul, R., & Uttal, D. (1998). A cross-cultural study of young children’s mapping abilities. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 23(n.s.), 1–9.
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