Children's mental rotations of abstract displays

Three studies are presented in which the content of children's representations of spatial displays is examined. It is argued that ordered sets of descriptions constructed from critical features form the basis for perceiving, remembering, and transforming these displays. Children solving a rotation problem chose their response from a set of four alternatives designed to indicate specific errors. The studies examined the hypotheses that codability and not extent of distance determines difficulty, that critical features and not whole objects are coded, and that implicit perceptual axes provide a frame of reference for coding the display. Results across the three studies supported these hypotheses. These results are discussed in terms of a description of spatial representation in which relational propositional statements are assigned to displays.