Development Changes in Neighborhood Scene Recognition

Abstract

Forty-four children ranging in age from seven years to fifteen years, all residents of a suburban neighborhood, were tested on a scene recognition task containing slide views taken at decision points and non-decision points from routes in their own neighborhood and distractor neighborhoods. As expected, young children (7-8) showed less knowledge of neighborhood locations than 9-12 year old children, who in turn had less knowledge than the adolescents (13-15). More importantly, scene knowledge for loci at intersections versus along routes was undifferentiated for seven to eight year old children, whereas it was clearly differentiated for nine to twelve year old children, as well as for thirteen to fifteen year olds. The data support a three stage model of developing spatial cognition. Young children (7-8) show little differentiation of knowledge by route location. Nine to twelve year old children show evidence of cognitive route representations with a clear differentiationf route locations. The performance of the oldest group suggests a knowledge representation in which location knowledge is very high while the differentiation by route location is maintained.