Herman J F, Shiraki J H, Miller B S
Child Dev. 1985 Oct;56(5):1195-203.
Young (mean age = 3-9) and old (mean age = 5-0) nursery school children were tested on their ability to infer spatial relationships in a large, familiar environment. Each child in the younger group was matched to a child of the same sex in the older group who had been attending the nursery school for the same number of months. Subjects were taken to 3 different locations in their nursery school and were asked to point to 5 targets on the school grounds. Older children were more accurate than younger children on nursery school targets, but children's spatial representations were relatively nonintegrated at both age levels. Consistent sex differences in favor of males were discussed in the context of a new framework that could potentially explain the appearance of sex differences on spatial tasks conducted in large-scale environments. It was concluded that very young children have difficulty inferring spatial relationships, even in a large, familiar environment. This difficulty seems to be due to a relative lack of symbolic capacity.
对幼儿（平均年龄3至9岁）和大龄儿童（平均年龄5至0岁）在一个大型且熟悉的环境中推断空间关系的能力进行了测试。较小组中的每个孩子都与大龄组中同性别的、在幼儿园就读月数相同的孩子进行匹配。受试者被带到他们幼儿园的3个不同地点，并被要求指出校园内的5个目标物。在幼儿园目标物方面，大龄儿童比幼儿更准确，但在两个年龄组中，儿童的空间表征相对都未整合。在一个新框架的背景下讨论了有利于男性的一致性别差异，该框架可能解释在大规模环境中进行的空间任务上出现性别差异的现象。得出的结论是，即使在大型且熟悉的环境中，非常年幼的儿童在推断空间关系方面也存在困难。这种困难似乎是由于相对缺乏符号能力。
