Abstract
Young children's ability to organize a spatial array independent of its surroundings was investigated in the context of Minsky's frame theory. Five to six year-old children were asked to reconstruct a display of three objects arranged in the form of a triangle, after turning their own bodies around. Experiment 1 demonstrated that many children produced a mirror image of the original array. Experiment 2 showed that children made the mirror-image response much less frequently (1) when the stimulus array was covered with a big blind at the beginning, or (2) when children's point of view was externalized in terms of a stuffed toy which was placed in front of them. These results suggest that a "view frame," which is usually embedded in the "global spatial frame," can function well independent of it even in young children.
