The article describes a case study of children and young people's participation and the attendant effects on professional practice and child-adult relations. The authors consider the findings under four headings: professional learning, child-adult relations, childhood memories and the spatial dimensions of change. Evidence indicates that adults…

To identify the role of the child's own action in the development of the ability to coordinate perspectives, a spatial localization task was presented to 2 groups of children: 16 children between 18 and 24 months old, and 16 children between 42 and 48 months old. A reward was hidden randomly in one of two identical left-right locations on a…

As the viewer watches the opening credits for the program "Entertainment Tonight," the screen comes to life with rotating shapes and spinning geometric patterns. One has the sense of travelling on an imaginary voyage through space. Many of the computer generated displays common now on television use such visual devices as linear perspective,…

Examined whether spatial classification is discovered during play and if external products of play lead children to use space to represent similarity. Found through two experiments--a longitudinal study of four children's classification behaviors, and the examination of play behavior with two types of objects--that comparison of different kinds…

Two experiments examined the effects of common motion, background texture, and orientation on four-month olds' perception of unity of a partially occluded rod. Results indicated that infants' perception of object unity is not dependent on a single visual cue but on a variety of cues including motion, interposition, depth cues, background texture,…

Two experiments examined children's ability to use lengths of lines on a page to show orientations of object surfaces. Found that five- and six-year olds are more reluctant to depart from actual object proportions than seven- and eight-year olds, but children in both age groups can foreshorten line lengths to indicate surfaces receding from a…

Examined the ability of 1-year olds to remember the location of nonvisible targets. Found that infants were able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and to code its distance and direction with respect to themselves or the larger framework. Difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks was associated with cognitive complexity and…

Two studies investigated the effect of age on memory for visual and spatial information. Five to 10 year olds were asked to reconstruct a previously seen spatial arrangement of objects. The association between an object's identity and its location was weaker for younger than for older children. (LB)

Sixty-four infants viewed side-by-side videotapes of toy trains (in four visual conditions) and listened to sounds at increasing or decreasing amplitude designed to match one of the videos. Results suggested that five-month olds were sensitive to auditory-visual distance relations and that change in size was an important visual depth cue. (MDM)

Investigated 4-6 year olds' ability to compare the distances covered by a direct and an indirect route to a location. Although many children believed that both routes covered the same distance, about 40% of the four year olds could explain why the direct route was shorter. (MDM)

Studies have shown that perception of distance, orientation and size can be dissociated from action tasks. The action system seems to possess more veridical, unbiased information than the perceptual/verbal system. The current study examines the nature of the distinction between action and verbal responses in a spatial reasoning task. Participants…

Serial order is fundamental to perception, cognition and behavioral action. Three experiments investigated infants' perception, learning and discrimination of serial order. Four- and 8-month-old infants were habituated to three sequentially moving objects making visible and audible impacts and then were tested on separate test trials for their…

One of the important nutrients during pregnancy is vitamin A or related compounds called retinoids. Although it is well-known that vitamin A deficiency may be detrimental to foetal development, overdosage of retinoids might cause developmental defects, particularly affecting the central nervous system development of the foetus, causing hindbrain…

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal…

Research on the emergence of sex differences in spatial ability during early adolescence prompted a meta-analysis of 172 spatial ability studies conducted since 1974. The meta-analysis confirmed that there are actually several spatial abilities, that some types of spatial ability show marked sex differences while others show none, and that spatial…