The use of front-back arrays by young children to code locations

Research suggests that during the first 2 years of life, children use an egocentric reference system and an extrinsic reference frame, the latter being one allocentric reference system, to encode locations. However, little is known about children's use of an object's intrinsic structure, another allocentric reference system. The current study focused on the role of the front-back relationship, one of the simplest intrinsic reference frames, in children's location encoding. Children (3- to 5-year-olds) participated in a hide-and-find game with one of three different intrinsic front-back array conditions: a facet-induced front-back array, a motion-induced front-back array, or no array. The results showed that whereas the ability to use a facet-induced front-back array began by 3 years of age, children used a motion-induced front-back array to encode locations at 4 years of age. These results provide evidence that the developmental trajectories of using an intrinsic reference frame to encode locations vary and depend on the specific spatial array involved.