Locating objects and communicating about locations: Organizational differences in children's searching and direction-giving.

Two studies examined spatial organization reflected in searches for objects and descriptions of locations. Six-year-olds and adults retrieved objects hidden on the floors of a house or directed another person about how to retrieve them. Of particular interest was whether children's searches and directions reflected clustering of locations by floors. Six-year-olds' searches were more organized than their directions, but a follow-up study demonstrated that they could produce organized directions if prompted. Analyses of the content and structure of spatial information in directions indicated that children and adults communicated the information in an order of decreasing size of spatial unit. Results are discussed in terms of factors underlying spatially organized searching and directiongiving. Locating objects and places is a practical task that occupies a great deal of everyday human and animal behavior. A major concern of infants and young children, for example, is finding and maintaining proximity to their primary caregiver (Carr, Dabbs, & Carr, 1975). Adults also spend a considerable amount of time searching for valued items such as car keys, checkbooks, and papers containing important pieces of information. Likewise, children and adults frequently are confronted with requests from others to tell them the whereabouts of missing objects. A daily routine in many households, for example, is getting children to describe where they put their shoes or the last place they remember seeing their homework. Clearly, children's skill in searching for missing objects and describing their whereabouts has important practical consequences. Understanding these skills also has theoretical implications for understanding the development of children's referential communication skills and how spatial information is extracted from the surrounding environment and from memory. Children as young as 4 years are capable of spatially organized searches in situations in which there are relatively few locations that are subdivided into a small number of spatial clusters. For example, Wellman, Somerville, Revelle, Haake, and Sophian (1984) found that 4- and 5-year-olds minimized the number of traverses they made between two clusters of loca