Finding your way with map is so easy even four-year-olds can do it
‘From four years old, they were able to use one room as a guide to finding the object in the other’
READING a map is so easy that even four-year-olds can do it, psychologists have found.
Children start to develop the basic skills required for map reading from the age of four, according to research from the University of East Anglia.
Researchers found that four-yearolds have spatial intelligence which enables them to use a scale model to find things in the real world – a precursor to map reading. They said their findings, published in the journal Developmental Psychology, suggest that mapreading ability may be cognitively simpler than previously thought.
For their research, the team looked at 175 two- to five-year-olds in what is thought to be the largest study of its kind.
Lead researcher Dr Martin Doherty, of the UEA’S School of Psychology, said: “We wanted to find out when children can use scale models or maps to learn things about the world, so we played a hiding game with 175 children aged between two and five years old. We showed them a sticker hidden in a model of a room, and then they had to look for another sticker in the ‘same place’ in another model of the room.
“The two- and three-year-olds were not able to recognise that the spatial arrangements in the model rooms were the same.
“But from about four years old, they were able to use one model room as a guide to finding the object in the other.”
The authors said performance on the tasks “improves rapidly” between the ages of three and five, and that the trial shows that children are able to display “spatial abilities” using model rooms.
“Based on prior literature and present results, these abilities can be divided thus: very young children can recognise the similarity of objects; children from the age of about three years can understand that two similar objects in the two spaces correspond; children from the age of about four years can understand that the two spaces themselves, in terms of their similar spatial layout, correspond.
“In other words, the developmental sequence is object similarity, item-to-item correspondence, and spatial correspondence,” they said.
According to Dr Doherty, their experiments show that children start to develop the basic skills of map reading from the age of four.
He said their work also helps to resolve a “controversial” developmental question: Is understanding models a representational ability or a spatial one?
The researchers wrote: “Types of representation include mental states, language, pictures, and scale models.
“By ‘understanding of representation’, we mean the ability to think about the relation between the representational medium and the thing it represents.”