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CHILDREN adore maps. Their lore abounds with charts showing buried treasure,
plans of secret hideaways and maps of magical islands. Maps decorate their
books, from Winnie-the-Pooh to The Hobbit. From the homely glades of the
Hundred Acre Wood to the most hostile corner of Middle Earth, maps create
a unique brand of excitement.

By the time we reach adulthood, the thrill has gone. In a strange city,
we carry a discreet street map, but we unfold it only in emergencies. On
a car journey we often shun the road map, preferring instead to ask locals
for directions. If we consult a map, we make mistakes and take wrong turnings,
wasting time, squandering petrol and creating pointless pollution. According
to one estimate, wasted mileage accounts for 4 per cent of all car driving.
Not surprisingly, a considerable volume of research suggests that adults
are generally ill at ease with maps.

The implications for education are obvious: we ought to introduce children
to maps as soon as they are old enough to enjoy it. How old is old enough?
Until a few years ago, the answer might have been seven or eight years of
age, but attitudes have changed . Psychologists are steadily rolling back
a set of conservative assumptions about children’s abilities with maps.
The current view is that children as young as three can decode simple maps
while searching for a hidden toy. A year later they can use them to navigate
their way through a maze. Many children can read simple maps before they
can read.

One of the first studies to challenge tradition came from Neil Bluestein
and Linda Acredolo at the University of California at Davis. Bluestein and
Acredolo arranged a simple treasure hunt in a small room. Children had to
look at a map of the room, then find a hidden toy by deciphering its position
on the map. The room contained several landmarks – chairs, a table and foam
shapes – in addition to four small boxes, one of which concealed a toy elephant
called Peanut. To everyone’s surprise, children of five years of age invariably
found Peanut without difficulty, with the four-year-olds close on their
heels. An even greater shock was that a half of the three-year-olds came
through the test as accomplished map-readers.

More recently, Mark Blades and Christopher Spencer at the University
of Sheffield conducted similar tests with models instead of maps. Although
this renders the children’s task somewhat less abstract, the psychologists
regard it as a close approximation to map-reading.

Two key findings emerged from the study. Children as young as three
can find a toy hidden in a room by consulting a model of the room. They
can also place a doll on the model to mark their own position in the room.
There can be no doubt that they understand what the model represents, they
can decode its symbols and they can imagine their own position on the model.
In short, young children have all the necessary equipment for map-reading.

Judy DeLoache has studied the development of these skills in some remarkable
experiments at the University of Illinois. DeLoache showed children a scale
model of a nearby room, complete with miniature furniture. They watched
as she hid a tiny toy dog in the model. She then asked them to go into the
room itself and retrieve a larger toy dog from the hiding place indicated
on the model. Success came easily to three-year-olds, but children just
six months younger were utterly inept, failing to realise the connection
between model and room. This effect was not due to shorter memories in the
younger toddlers, because they remembered the tiny dog’s whereabouts in
the model after failing in the room.

DeLoache argues that the three-year-olds have developed a highly significant
skill – the ability to see the model both as an object and as a symbol.
Their younger playmates cannot manipulate both ideas at once and tend to
see it merely as an object. If DeLoache shows them a photograph of the room
instead of the model and tells them where the dog is hiding, the task becomes
easier for them. They also improve if she repeats the basic test with the
model behind a pane of glass in a puppet theatre, making it more of a picture
and less of an object in its own right.

Indoor treasure hunts and the like make superb experiments, but they
are remote from the way adults use maps to navigate in unfamiliar surroundings.
Blades and Spencer have extended the research into outdoor games, in which
children use a map to find their way through a maze chalked on the ground.
One such maze is made of three successive T-junctions. Wrong choices lead
to a blocked path; correct choices lead onto the next T-junction and finally
to the exit from the maze. To make life more complicated, the researchers
add strategically placed screens to prevent the diminutive navigators from
taking in the entire layout from one vantage point. This ploy forces the
youngsters to use the map to deduce where the blockages are. Children carry
the maps on clipboards as they go and often follow the route with one finger
on the map, updating their position like seasoned orienteers.

After studying 120 children between three and six years old, Blades
and Spencer emerged with some intriguing findings. Many of the youngsters
navigated with striking skill, despite lacking previous experience with
maps. As expected, performance improved with age, but children of four-and-a-half
were already surprisingly able. Only the very youngest children chose randomly
at the T-junctions.

Older children did make some mistakes, but these arose because they
lost track of their progress through the maze. To help them to find their
bearings the team added brightly coloured buckets to the layout to act as
landmarks. With these depicted on their maps, a second group of children
outperformed the first group. The experiment proved that young children
can pinpoint their position on a map by taking note of nearby landmarks.

The researchers at Sheffield have also experimented with more complex
mazes. One is based on an octagonal network of paths, with a box at each
corner. Inside each box is a painted circle, visible only when the child
stands close to the box. The task is to walk around the rim of the octagon
and then approach the centre from the corner indicated on a map. If the
corner in question is the only one of its colour, the task is fairly easy;
but if the same colour appears at two, or three, corners, the layout becomes
rather demanding. To solve such a puzzle, the child must monitor several
successive corners before making a decision. By the age of seven, children
can reason their way around these tortuous problems, making what seems a
close approach to complex map reading. At four-and-a-half their skills are
more limited, but they can manage the task if the correct corner is the
only one of its colour.

Another way of probing children’s skills is to give them maps that are
not aligned with their surroundings, that is, the top of the map no longer
corresponds to straight ahead. With this in mind, Blades and Spencer designed
a kind of outdoor treasure hunt. The design is a crossroads in the shape
of a St Andrew’s cross. At the end of each arm of the cross is a box, one
of which holds a toy hidden by the researchers. A red plastic bucket near
one box acts as a landmark. Each child receives a map showing the toy’s
hiding place, but the map is either at 90 or 180 degrees to the actual layout.
The idea behind this mischievous twist is to give the children a task that
actually stretches them – one worthy of their powers of reasoning.

A tiny minority of children worked out that they could turn the map
round and thereby make the task easier, the usual adult strategy. Other
children managed with the map upside down, showing again that they were
capable of some refined spatial reasoning. A particularly telling feature
was the role played by the landmark. If the toy was in the box close to
the bucket, or in the box diametrically opposite, children found it with
ease. If it was in one of the other boxes, impossible to distinguish by
proximity to the landmark, mistakes were much more common.

For psychologists, experiments with maps and models open a window onto
the minds of young children. The children in the tests are solving problems
on a map and applying the solution to the real world. At the same time,
they are gathering information from their surroundings and applying it to
the map. In effect, they are transferring information from one area of experience
to another, a skill that goes far beyond maps and map reading. The fact
that children as young as three will cooperate in such tests provides researchers
with a useful tool for studying early cognitive development.

Further insights into children’s powers of reasoning are emerging from
studies of the more sedentary skills involved in map reading. For example,
four-year-olds can apparently decipher many of the symbols used on simple
street maps without being specially taught them beforehand. They readily
identify roads, roundabouts, parks and rivers, showing that they understand
how such features appear from above. At the University of Gothenburg, Torgny
Ottosson has uncovered a similar level of understanding by showing road
maps to five-year-olds.

Young children also have a rudimentary grasp of coordinates – a skill
of obvious relevance to work with maps – according to Susan Somerville of
Arizona State University and Peter Bryant of the University of Oxford. These
researchers showed children a square board marked with an array of four
dots. The children had to say which one of the dots corresponded to a given
pair of coordinates. In spite of their tender years, children as young as
four-and-a-half performed respectably, proving that official estimates of
their ability were much in need of revision.

On a similar note, Blades and Spencer wondered whether young children
could use a simple version of a grid reference. They constructed a board
made up of an array of 16 squares and an overlying network of grid lines
labelled with letters and numbers. Each square, with its unique grid reference,
held a picture hidden beneath a cardboard cover. Children had to track down
a given picture by decoding its grid reference and uncovering the correct
square on the board. Six-year-olds passed the test with flying colours,
but younger children found the task somewhat demanding. However their confusion
disappeared once the researchers labelled the grid lines with colours instead
of letters and numbers, which the youngsters had apparently found rather
daunting.

Results such as these offer much encouragement to pioneering educationalists,
who have long advocated the early use of maps in the classroom. According
to Simon Catling, who lectures in education at Oxford Polytechnic, nursery
school is a good place to lay the foundations. An important first stage
is to develop children’s language, so that they can describe where things
are and give each other instructions about getting from one place to another.
Drawing around toy cars on a paper road can help children to understand
how the world looks from above. Maps in stories give children a chance to
track the movements of the main characters. David Flint, who trains teachers
at Newman College, Birmingham, makes the same point, arguing that existing
subject matter often lends itself to work with simple maps, once teachers
realise its potential. An obvious candidate would be a story such as Little
Red Riding Hood, in which villages, paths and grandmother’s house can be
plotted on a map. Or, if children happen to be building models that have
to be put away at the end of the day, they can preserve the layout by drawing
a plan view, or by means of a network of elastic ‘grid lines’. No one doubts
that children need to acquire an armoury of skills if they are to appreciate
complex maps, but a solid foundation never comes amiss.

At the University of Sheffield, Kim Morsley has recently extended studies
of maps and models into work with blind children. The aim is to boost the
children’s self-confidence and improve their mobility by increasing their
awareness of their surroundings. That awareness can be severely limited,
largely because the children encounter objects consecutively, by touch or
hearing, instead of simultaneously as sighted people do. This can make it
hard for them to entertain a mental overview of the space around them. When
it comes to finding their way around, they must follow a set of learnt routes.
Like new arrivals in a strange city, they cannot easily relate those routes
to one another or place them in an overall context. As a result, short cuts,
detours and novel routes become immensely challenging.

Morsley and her colleagues began their work with models because some
psychologists consider maps too abstract to be useful to the blind. The
children’s first job was to make a replica of their school dormitory or
gymnasium out of model furniture – a task that they found quite easy. Often
the models revealed a more accurate awareness of space than was apparent
from more conventional tests, such as asking the children to face or point
towards particular objects in the room.

The next stage was to introduce maps to the children. The researchers
adopted an approach based on the treasure hunt, in which they hid a toy
in the dormitory and signalled its location on a map. (The maps are made
of plastic, moulded to show features in relief, often by means of abstract
symbols.) All except the youngest children grasped the idea very quickly
and were soon playing the game like old hands. The stage was now set for
the crucial experiment: would a map give blind children a better understanding
of space than they could otherwise have? The researchers arranged five objects
in a room: a bridge, a doll’s house, a barrel, a teddy bear and a rocking
horse. One group of children studied a map of the room, while members of
a second group simply wandered around the room exploring it. After a suitable
interval, children demonstrated their newly acquired knowledge by pointing
and facing towards various objects.

Many of the children who had used the map were better at pointing and
facing than the wanderers. Yet there were some important exceptions. Older
children were less likely to benefit, as were children who had some rudimentary
vision. For them, it seems, the map simply got in the way of a routine strategy
that they had already perfected.

A similar picture has emerged from outdoor tests in a special garden.
For blind children, especially those aged five to eight, maps bring significant
gains, among which are greater confidence and freedom of movement. Sighted
or blind, the moral of the story is that an early introduction to maps is
feasible, fruitful and fun.

* * *

Too young to benefit from maps?

UNTIL recently many teachers believed that children younger than seven
or eight were too young to benefit from schoolwork with maps. How did this
view take root? Some psychologists trace it to the work of the Swiss polymath
Jean Piaget (1896-1980).

Piaget’s first love was zoology. At the age of 10, he published his
first paper, an ornithological note on an albino sparrow. At 21, he wrote
a dissertation on Swiss molluscs which earned him his doctorate. He went
on to make many influential contributions to the study of child psychology.
His experiments convinced him that children acquire an understanding of
space at a distinctly leisurely pace. Of particular relevance to maps were
his ideas about young children’s egocentricity, their inability to imagine
how the world might look from any other angle.

Piaget and his colleague Barbel Inhelder probed this limitation in the
so-called ‘three mountains experiment’. They showed children a model depicting
a range of three mountains, one green, one brown and one grey. Using coloured
cardboard shapes, the children had to create a picture of the model as it
looked to them. Afterwards, they had to try to imagine how it would look
from another angle. Try as they might, children younger than seven or eight
invariably failed at the task. They tended instead to create another picture
showing the model from their own vantage point. Only as they grew older
could they rise above this personal perspective.

Piaget’s disciples applied his theories to maps. If children were to
understand maps, the argument went, they would need to be able to imagine
a shift in perspective from the usual human one to a bird’s-eye view. Thorough
comprehension would also need an understanding of Euclidean geometry, coordinates
and scale. All of this seemed quite beyond the under-sevens, with predictable
implications for teachers.

As part of a general re-evaluation of Piaget’s ideas, many psychologists
now consider that he underestimated children’s skills – a strange tendency
in one so precocious. Even three-year-olds, it seems, can sometimes put
themselves in the place of someone else and imagine the world from that
angle. The three mountains experiment, for all its apparent importance,
may just have been too boring, or too remote from the children’s experience,
to engage their full attention.

* * *

The emergence of a magnetic personality

AS WELL as skilful map users, young children are generally rather good
at finding their way around. No large public function would be complete
without its quota of stray children, but these wanderers are exceptional.
Many children are accomplished navigators.

Any number of mechanisms could be at work here. Psychologists have studied
way-finding in considerable detail, showing that some children as young
as four can retrace a route after just one exposure, largely by remembering
a series of landmarks. Zoologists, whose training predisposes them towards
the exotic, have looked for a more dramatic mechanism behind human navigation.
One candidate is an in-built magnetic compass similar to the one used to
such good effect by migrating birds. This idea has been the focus of a considerable
programme of research by Robin Baker and colleagues at the University of
Manchester.

At Manchester, Gai Murphy has completed a large-scale study of children
and their sense of direction. Murphy’s technique simply involved spinning
her blindfolded subjects in a swivel chair; when the chair stopped, they
had to say which direction they thought they were facing. On each spin,
the chair came to rest at one of eight possible positions (facing towards
north, northeast, east and so on). A computer made sure that successive
stops were in a random order. Objects such as chairs or pictures occupied
the four cardinal points to make identification easier.

After testing 1279 children, Murphy emerged with some remarkable conclusions.
Young children are without a developed sense of direction – as measured
by the swivel chair – until the age of 11. Thereafter there is a sharp difference
between the sexes. Boys remain inept, but girls excel, right through their
teens and beyond. Only at age 13 to 14, do boys rise above their usual dullness,
before slipping back into insensitivity as they grow older.

Murphy’s tests provide compelling evidence that the children’s sense
of direction has its roots in an awareness of the Earth’s magnetic field.
When girls wore a magnet at eye level (it was fixed to the elastic strap
of their opaque goggles) the result was a precipitous decline in accuracy
– exactly as one would expect if the magnet interfered with perception of
the Earth’s magnetic field. No such effects emerged in similar tests employing
an inert brass bar instead of a magnet.

So are boys without a magnetic sense? Not necessarily, says Murphy.
She believes that their insensitivity could be an effect of the test’s design.
Boys, it seems, try to judge their position by monitoring the chair’s every
movement. Their ploy fails dismally, but, buoyed up by confidence, they
never give up and fall back on their magnetic sense. Girls, on the other
hand, are soon aware that they cannot keep track of the chair’s motion.
They think they are simply guessing, but unconsciously they are consulting
their magnetic compasses.

Stephen Young is a science writer based in Wales.