Children's control of reference systems in spatial tasks: Foundations of spatial cognitive skill?

Two experiments are presented, one that focused on the abilities of 3- through 8-year-old children to use frames of reference as means for solving a search task in a small-scale perceived space and one that focused on the abilities of 8- through 11-year-old children to use different frames of reference to answer questions about the locations of objects in an environment they had read about. Experiment 1 revealed developmental improvement in the consistent application of object-, place-, and viewer-based frames of reference, with scale of space impacting the pattern of age-related improvement. Experiment 2 showed that young readers' first successes with switching from one reference system to another in representational space involved a vantage point perspective, a viewer-based ``gaze tour' of a small-scale area. Although disparate in focus and method, the studies point to the need for a new theoretical framework for examining developmental issues in the application of spatial frames of reference.