HCI VISTAS, VOLUME-III, 2007-2008
	Spatial Descriptions by Children Dr. Dinesh Katre
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This article is in continuation of my series on "child's perception of the world". I have already written- A child's testimony to toy and game designers User's reality: The big truth of small things! Child's perception of space       Sample architectural maps (a small apartment and a bungalow) drawn by an 8.5 years old kid
One day I asked some kids (age-group of 7 to 9 years) in my neighborhood, to draw the maps of their homes. I have picked up above drawings only as a sample. Most of the maps had similar characteristics as above drawings.   I did this, as I wanted to know children's perception of architectural space, particularly the overall layout and relative positions of rooms, corridors, galleries, etc. I wanted to learn about their spatial competence, how they code the locations, how they navigate around the world, how they represent and mentally manipulate spatial information and their spatial descriptions.   When I introduced the task, I realized that most kids did not know how a map is drawn. Some of them went on to draw real-world view of the house. I understood their problem. Most children had not seen architectural maps before.   Drawing a map is cognitively challenging. It requires you to do some abstract visualization.   One has to perform following mental tasks- § Recall the images of the house in memory § Imagine the top view of the house §  Mentally rotate the rooms to understand their relative positions (e.g.- If I am standing in the living room facing the window then the bedroom would be on my left side. If I was facing the door then it would be on my right.) Such visualization requires you to do the mental rotations. § Structure and organize various elements in the mental space §  Convert three-dimensional elements into two-dimensional outlines §  Plan overall scheme of things §  Estimate the space requirements on paper (scale the map in mind) §  Draw it, name it   Kids had not done this before. I demonstrated and explained how a map is drawn to them. They were happy and excited. The output is before you.   Two sides of the wall as two different walls Most kids got the maps right with some exceptions. What amused me most is the drawing of partition walls between the rooms, the non-existent corridors (highlighted in green) and the non-existent open spaces between the rooms (highlighted in yellow)! Apparently, in the perception of kids, each room seems to have 4 separate walls. They tend to mistake two sides of the same wall as two different walls. Probably because each room is painted in different color and therefore such perception gets created. If each room is drawn with separate walls then naturally you have to connect them with lines, which looks like a corridor (highlighted in green). But kids don't see it as corridor. It is only to connect and indicate the doorway between the two rooms. I had to verify some of these drawings to confirm about the non-existent elements.   Confusion between the relative positions of various rooms (in case of complex architectures) The second drawing shows number of items like car parking, enclosure for dog, toilet, and parent's bedroom, which are floating in space. They have no connection with the initial attempt of the map. Probably the kid got tired of visualizing the locations, mental rotations and gave up positioning these items on the map and instead just sketched them around the map.   Multistoried maps as linear extensions The map shown in the second drawing is in two parts. A staircase connects the ground floor and the first floor maps. It is an unplanned drawing. The kid must have got confused about how to depict the map of first floor, as it is exactly on top of the ground floor. We can see that the staircase leads the first floor map as a linear extension. The kid seems to have lost the sense of direction hereafter. The second map has little resemblance with real house.   Struggle between the regular view and the top view Look at the drawings of tables (highlighted in blue) in both the maps. Actually the legs of the table wouldn't be visible from the top. But the kid has drawn the legs around the tabletop in order to give them proper visibility. Even the doors are shown in the regular front view (highlighted in pink).   It is well known that small kids are more comfortable in smaller spaces. You see them sitting under the bed or the sofa so as to reduce the scale of the world to match with their own proportions (physical and cognitive). Their cognition of smaller spaces is more effective than the large/complex architectural spaces. It is evident in the second map; towards extreme right of the drawing, things are pretty confused and scattered. It will be interesting to study the children's perception of 3D terrains and 3D architectures used in computer games. Such study may help in revealing the difference between the perception of spaces from real-world and virtual world. I had conducted 3D comprehension tests on villagers in 2004 for a game design project. A brief report is made available here in PDF format for reference. I think, it may be relevant here.
Download 3D Comprehension Test Report 2004
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