Imagery, Action, and Young Children's Spatial Orientation: It's Not Being There That Counts, It's What One Has in Mind

Young children typically fail when asked to judge how objects would look if they moved or changed shape, and this has been taken to mean that they lack the competencies for dynamic imagery. We used a different approach to study young children's imagination and found evidence of much earlier competence. Across 6 experiments, people were asked to imagine familiar surroundings and anticipate their spatial orientation from different observation points there. In the first 2 experiments, children (2 1/2-9-year-olds) and their parents sat at home and were asked to call to mind knowledge of their (child's) classroom relative to the perspective at their (child's) seat at (pre)school. After this, subjects were asked to judge the perspective at the teacher's seat in each of 2 conditions. In the Locomotion Condition they were asked to imagine walking from their seat to the teacher's seat while physically walking a path that resembled the actual one in the remote classroom. In the Imagination-only Condition the instructions were the same but they were not accompanied with physical walking. Children 3 1/2 years of age and older, like the adults, were accurate and rapid in the Locomotion Condition. In the Imagination-only Condition the children almost never judged perspective correctly; the adults responded accurately but slowly. These findings were replicated and extended across 4 additional experiments designed to clarify the operating principles that link perceiving, imagining, and acting.