Somerville S C, Bryant P E
Child Dev. 1985 Jun;56(3):604-13.
4-6-year-old children were given problems in which they had to decide which 1 of an array of points was in line with 2 coordinate markers. The simplest problems had 4 points to choose between and markers perpendicular to the horizontal and vertical axes. Children of all ages were able to extrapolate lines from both coordinates to solve these problems. The older children were also given more complex problems. In some of these, 1 marker was at 45 degrees to an axis, the other perpendicular: in others the array was increased to 16 points and presented sometimes in a regular, sometimes in an irregular pattern. There were developmental improvements in performance, and the complex problems were more difficult than the simpler ones. However, 5- and 6-year-olds did extremely well even on the complex problems. The results establish that young children's grasp of Euclidean spatial relationships is more adequate than has often been suggested.
研究人员给4至6岁的儿童出了一些问题，要求他们从一系列点中判断哪一个点与两个坐标标记在一条直线上。最简单的问题有4个点可供选择，标记分别垂直于横轴和纵轴。所有年龄段的儿童都能够从两个坐标向外延伸直线来解决这些问题。年龄较大的儿童还被给予了更复杂的问题。其中一些问题中，一个标记与一条轴呈45度角，另一个标记垂直；在其他问题中，点的阵列增加到16个，并且有时以规则模式呈现，有时以不规则模式呈现。在表现上存在发展性进步，复杂问题比简单问题更难。然而，5岁和6岁的儿童即使在复杂问题上也表现得非常出色。研究结果表明，幼儿对欧几里得空间关系的理解比通常认为的更为充分。
