Abstract
When you turn away from your desk, how is it that you inevitably know the shortest direction to turn back to face it? When you enter your dark house at night, how are you able to point through walls (or floors) in the direction of your bathroom? When you habitually walk north from your office to the library and southeast from your office to the computer center, how do you find your way directly from the library to the computer center? These three questions concern how people solve one class of spatial problem, namely how they infer novel routes (or directions or distances) to a place from their experiences traveling other routes. The type of spatial problem is commonplace, solved whenever people invent shortcuts, detours or other variations to customary routes. This chapter is about the early development of spatial inferences such as these that are generated while way-finding.
The preparation of this chapter was supported in part by Grant HD-04510 from the National Institutes of Health to the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development, George Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. My thanks to H. L. Pick, Jr., D. A. Gurth, and K. Edwards, for their critical comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
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Rieser, J.J. (1983). The Generation and Early Development of Spatial Inferences. In: Pick, H.L., Acredolo, L.P. (eds) Spatial Orientation. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9325-6_2
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