Children's Versus Adults' Knowledge of Places and Distances in a Familiar Neighborhood Environment

Abstract

Pre-teenage children (ages 8-12) and their parents were tested on scene recognition and distance judgment tasks involving locations in their neighborhood. As predicted, scenes representing navigational choice points were best recognized. Distance judgment accuracy systematically varied with the intra- and intersegmental relationships and geometry of the individualocations compared. For both scene recognition and distance judgments, children performed better than adults. Performance was highest for pre-teenage girls and lowest for adult males. The results are considered in terms of theories of spatial knowledge acquisition and representation as well as the logical neighborhood interaction patterns for the different subject groups.