The issue of whether young children use spatio-temporal information (e.g., movement of objects through time and space) and/or contact-mechanical information (e.g., interaction between objects) to search for a hidden object was investigated. To determine whether one cue can have priority over the other, a dynamic event that put these cues into…

The ability to track moving objects, a crucial skill for mature performance on everyday spatial tasks, has been hypothesized to require a specialized mechanism that may be available in infancy (i.e. indexes). Consistent with the idea of specialization, our previous work showed that object tracking was more impaired than a matched spatial memory…

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children's (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity.…

An important characteristic of mature spatial cognition is the ability to encode spatial locations in terms of relations among landmarks as well as in terms of vectors that include distance and direction. In this study, we examined children's use of the relation "middle" to code the location of a hidden toy, using a procedure adapted…