As soon as infants can crawl, they begin to explore their environments. These explorations are usually limited to relatively circumscribed areas, such as a single room or adjacent rooms. In these settings, finding the way to a particular location is not complicated because the destination can usually be seen from the outset. Within a few years, however, children begin to explore much larger realms. They may move freely within an entire house or apartment building and in the surrounding environments. Now way-finding skills become essential because the child’s destination often cannot be seen from the start. When a 3year-old playing outdoors realizes that she’s hungry, the kitchen may not be in sight. To get there, she must know a route that will lead her indoors and into the kitchen. Learning to find ones way in an environment involves three related skills. First, children must identify landmarks, distinctive locations in an environment. Second, a child uses landmarks to form routes, sequences of action that lead from one landmark to another. Third, landmarks and routes are formed into clusters, or configurations. These ultimately form a cognitive map – a unified mental configuration of an environment that integrates many landmarks and routes.
Landmarks are salient objects or points of decision in the environment that are noticed and remembered and around which the child’s actions and decisions are coordinated. For children, landmarks might be a candy store, a playground, and a school crossing. Children move and travel to and from these landmarks, and they are used to maintain one’s course during travel. Learning about landmarks begins very early in life. Before children can walk, they move through environments in parents’ arms, in strollers, and in automobiles. Even when they are Still, infants see people and objects move in their environments. According to Piaget, a child first thinks of the position of an object in space exclusively in terms of the object’s position relative to the child’s own body what Piaget called an egocentric frame of reference. Only later do children acquire an objective frame of reference in which an object’s location is thought of relative to the positions of other objects in space. Not all elements in an environment are equally suited to be landmarks. An essential skill in wayfinding is to identify distinctive landmarks that will be recognized when one travels the route again.
Landmarks are essential to wayfinding in large environments, but alone they are not sufficient for travel. Instead, landmarks must be linked in a particular Sequence, forming a route in which the last landmark is the destination. If the sequence of landmarks does not conform to our expectations, we quickly have the feeling of “being lost.” Routes can thus be considered a kind of spatial “glue” that links environmental landmarks. The ability to learn routes improves consistently throughout the preschool years. Hazen, Luckman, and Pick found that year-olds needed 50 percent more trials than 5yea-rolds to learn a route through four rooms. By school age, children have acquired considerable skill in route learning. In one study, subjects saw a sequence of photographs depicting a walk through hallways. Each photograph contained an intersecting hallway, and the subject’s task was to learn the sequence of left and right turns that would lead to the end of the corridor. Seven-year-olds and adults learned this sequence at approximately the same rate. In addition, school age children and adolescents are very good at arranging photographs of landmarks in the order in which they were encountered along a route.
Although children can readily learn the sequences in which landmarks appear, they are less skilled than adults in estimating the distances between landmarks. Judging distance is important because it allows people to estimate the time needed to travel between two points. This, in turn, allows a traveler to estimate when a landmark should appear along a journey; we feel lost when a landmark that is expected after a certain distance fails to appear. A number of factors influence the accuracy with which people judge distances. For instance, when a barrier separates two landmarks so that one is not visible from the other, children and adults usually overestimate the distance between them.
When adults first encounter a novel environment, they often use maps to guide them. Children, too, can learn about environments from maps. In one study, and year-olds were asked to learn a specific route that connected six landmarks. Children who had memorized a map beforehand learned the route more rapidly than children who had not seen the map. Giving a map to children may help them to form their own cognitive maps of the environment.
Learning 10 to 100 or 1,000 different routes through an environment is not effective. A cognitive map is the mental structure by which humans apparently store the wayfinding information about an environment. It might seem that an easy way to examine children’s cognitive maps would be to ask them to draw maps of familiar environments. Actually, this method is not satisfactory because children know much more about their environments than they can draw accurately. Investigators have used a number of ingenious approaches to probe configurational knowledge. Consider the two routes shown in the “Neighborhood Map” below. A child’s knowledge of that neighborhood would be called configurational when, because of his or her specific position within the environment, the child would know the relative location of all four houses. If, for example, a child is walking east past the bank, his or her knowledge is configurational if the child knows that (1) house D is straight ahead; (2) house C is directly behind ; (3) house B is ahead, off to the left ; and (4) house A is behind, off to the left.
When people’s knowledge of their environment is assessed in this manner, accuracy is seen to improve gradually throughout childhood. In several studies, subjects have been taken to various locations in an environment and asked to try to point toward other landmarks. By 7 years of age, children’s estimates of the direction toward a landmark that is out of sight indicate that they are aware of the general locations of landmarks. Anosmia and Young found an average error of 27 degrees for 7year-olds. This is less accurate than the estimates of 10 and 13 year-olds ―17 and 14 degrees, respectively ― and it is certainly not the sort of precision that would allow one to navigate accurately from Vancouver to Honolulu. However, for 7year-olds’ needs for traveling within a neighborhood, this degree of precision is more than adequate. Further, knowing the direction of a landmark is only one part of configurational knowledge. Children must also know the approximate distance of that landmark. Children could well know that a landmark is in a particular direction but at the same time have a relatively poor idea of how far to travel in that direction. Children estimate distances between landmarks along familiar routes more accurately than distances between landmarks that are not connected by routes. But estimates of these latter distances become increasingly accurate with age.
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