Young children's ability to understand a model as a spatial representation

Children's ability to understand that a real environment can be represented in a symbolic form (i.e., by a model) is an important developmental achievement. Researchers have claimed that children who are just 3 years of age appreciate models as representations. This research was based on tasks that involved having young children use a model to locate a hiding place in an actual room. In this article, however, we point out the difficulties in interpreting previous model tasks, and we describe two studies that showed that young 3-year-olds could perform model tasks successfully when the hiding place they were looking for was a unique place in the model (and room). When the hiding place was unique, the children had to note only that place and they needed no further knowledge about the relationship between the model and the room. When the hiding place was one of two identical places, however, the children needed to take spatial relationships into account to distinguish the correct place, and young 3-year-olds were unable to do this. Four-year-olds were able to use spatial relationships to distinguish identical places when the model was aligned with the space it represented, but they had difficulty when the model was not aligned. Five-year-olds could use spatial relationships effectively between one model space and another whether or not the model was aligned.