British Journal of Developmental Psychology (1988).

6, 369-393 Printed in Great Britain 369

0 1988 The British Psychological Society

Special section: Landmarks in spatial

cognition and spatial development

The papers in this section are the result of a conference on Landmarks in Spatial
Cognition and Spatial Development, held at Arizona State University in February,
1988 and supported by the Graduate College. The conference participants prepared
short position papers, which were intended to stimulate discussion about any
interesting, unanswered questions, and to help define future directions for research
concerning landmarks.
Clark C . Presson

From signal to ‘symbol’: The development of

landmark knowledge from 9 to 13 months

Linda P. Acredolo
Department of Psychology, University of Calqornia- Davis, Davis, C A 956 16, U S A

Six-month-old infants tend to look back at a target that is marked by a salient

‘landmark’ (Acredolo & Evans, 1980; Rieser, 1979). I have suggested (Acredolo,
1985) that this is based on a simple association between ‘action at a landmark’ and the
occurrence of an event, rather than a true recognition of the spatial information the
landmark denotes. Only later in development does the infant move beyond such a
‘paired-associate’ treatment of landmarks to become aware (although perhaps not
‘consciously’ so at first) of the reasons for the predictability of the landmark-event
associations. At that point, presumably, the infant becomes capable of deliberately
relying on such relations to guide active, self-initiated, goal-directed search.
This hypothesis was based primarily on evidence from the 6-9-month-old side of
the developmental coin, evidence that suggested an absence of a truly spatial
treatment of landmarks. For example, in studies of spatial orientation and object
search with 6-9-month-oldsY for landmarks to affect behaviour they needed to be
extremely salient, in very close proximity to the hidden object, and repeatedly
associated with its recovery. As a case in point, Bremner & Bryant (1977) showed
that distinctive covers but not distinctive backgrounds (sides of the tablecloth)
helped infants to recover a hidden object. Millar & Schaffer (1972) found that 6- and
370 Linda P . Acredolo
9-month-old infants were quickly able to learn an S-R connection when the response
lever was adjacent to the feedback source, but not when it was spatially separated by
60’. In contrast, 12-month-old infants had no such problem. Finally, the fact that the
6-month-old infants in Acredolo & Evans (1980) appeared to be ‘hedging their bets’
by turning both in an egocentric direction and toward a landmark site after rotation
to the opposite side of the room, is consistent with the hypothesis that the spatial
relation being denoted by the landmark was not fully appreciated.
I would now like to add evidence that is relevant to the other side of the coin-the
advancement in landmark knowledge that replaces the ‘paired-associate’ phase just
described. Important strides towards mature appreciation of landmarks take place
between 9 and 13 months. I suggest that there is a sense in which the infant who
demonstrates an appreciation for the spatial-designation function of landmarks at the
end of the first year can be said to have achieved a ‘symbolic’ notion of landmarks-
that one object or feature can ‘stand for’ another in one’s memory for spatial
relations. Furthermore, it is even possible that the achievement of a symbol-referent
notion in the very practical area of spatial relations may actually facilitate the child’s
identification of such relations in other domains, such as play and language.
The most convincing evidence for this idea comes from Ashmead & Perlmutter
(1980) who showed that the ability to recall spontaneously the temporary, out-of-
sight locations of objects in the environment is part of an infant’s repertoire at 11
months, but not earlier (9 months). Up until this age infants seem to be restricted first
to random search for objects in the immediate vicinity and then to the recall of
permanent locations of out-of-sight objects. Clearly something fundamental has been
added to the 11-month-old infant’s representational capacities, and it is not simply
the ability to access at will a memory for a learned association (i.e. paired-associate)
between action at a landmark and recovery of an object. In contrast, what these 11-
month-olds are doing is storing and retrieving-after a single encounter-a spatial
relation between landmark and target object. The ability to do so, I am convinced,
arises in large part because appreciation of the spatial relation between the two has
been heightened and is therefore among the most retainable components of the
child’s memory for the episode in which the target object was most recently
encountered.
A natural question is whether independent evidence exists that infants during the
9-13-month period give particular attention to spatial relations. One source of such
evidence comes from everyday observations of infants at play. Nine-13-month-old
infants are entranced with object manipulations which focus on the spatial relations
of ‘in/out’, ‘on/under’, ‘on/off ’, and ‘behind’. They seem to be entertained ceaselessly
by putting kitchen pans in and out of each other, taking lids off and putting them
back on, filling up and emptying containers, and playing peek-a-boo. Something may
be learned here which will make the spatial relation between landmark and object
stand out as an identifiable component of an event. In addition, such activity is
probably instrumental in the development of knowledge about specific spatial
properties of objects so that, for example, the infant’s concept of an upright cup
comes to include its function as a transporter of things from place to place. There is
evidence for such knowledge in a study b y Freeman, Lloyd & Sinha (1980) in which
infants from 9 months on were better at finding an object concealed in an upright cup
 Development of landmark knowledge from 9 to 13 months 37 1
than under an inverted cup when the cup was one of two and was moved from one
site to another.
The onset of self-produced locomotion between 7 and 10 months makes an
important contribution to the increased salience of spatial relations during the 9-1 3-
month period. Much has been written about the facilitative effects of this milestone,
and the arguments are convincing both on an intuitive and empirical level. Along
with self-produced locomotion comes an increase in the goal-directedness of the
baby’s behaviour. The self-mobile child suddenly has almost unlimited opportunities
to initiate searches, test hypotheses about locations, and perfect successful strategies.
Kermoian & Campos (in press) compared the object permanence abilities of three
groups of 8.5-month-old infants: non-crawlers, crawlers, and non-crawlers with
walker experience. Their results showed a clear advantage for the two groups with
self-produced locomotor experience, and the longer the infants had been locomoting,
the more advanced their object permanence behaviour was. The suggested vehicle
for this advance in object knowledge is the mobilization of attention that accompa-
nies self-produced locomotion, an hypothesis that is supported by the correlation
between attentiveness to object location and length of time since the onset of
crawling (Horobin & Acredolo, 1986).
‘Distancing’ of symbol from refrent. Symbols within any domain d o not emerge in a
fully mature form. Instead they undergo a process of development whereby there is
increasing flexibility in their usage. This flexibility is often described by a spatial
analogy of increased ‘distance’ between the symbol and its referent. Let’s take the
development of symbolic play as an example. When the infant first pretends to feed a
baby, the symbol for baby is most frequently a realistic substitute-a baby doll.
Similarly, pretending to talk on a telephone usually first necessitates the use of a real
or a realistic facsimile of a telephone. However, as the symbolic function becomes
more firmly rooted, the infant becomes able-and eager-to substitute much less
realistic objects for the ones he/she has in mind. Thus, it is with great glee that 18-
month-olds feed a paper-cleaner doll or talk into a banana. Likewise, early words are
initially tied very closely to the specific instantiation of their referent that plays a role
in a particular routine or script. For example, a child may first use ‘moo’ only to label
a specific cow in a specific picture book. Eventually, however, the label becomes
‘distanced’ from this initial context and applicable more generally.
I think these changes within other domains of the symbolic function are
instructive for what they suggest about continuing development of landmark
knowledge. In particular they provide a framework for understanding some of the
interesting results reported by DeLoache in her studies of hide-and-seek performance
in 18-29-month-old toddlers (e.g. DeLoache & Brown, 1983). Briefly, she has found
that infants at these ages are extremely good at remembering where an object has
been hidden in a natural setting, like a living room or a laboratory play room-a
pattern which one would expect given the argument being advanced above about the
9-13-month period. One obstacle to good performance, however, occurs if the
object is first hidden in a box that is indistinguishable from other boxes and then all
the boxes are placed in sight at various locations within the room. In this case, the
18-22-month-olds have trouble, while the 24-29-month-olds d o not. DeLoache’s
explanation for the poor performance of the younger children is that for this age
312 Linda P . Acredolo
group the landmark and the hidden object must be more directly linked in memory
for the landmark to designate location. In the terminology traditional in regard to
symbols, they must not be too ‘distanced’ from each other-with distance here
meaning perhaps either feet and inches, or more likely, intervening spatial relations
(i.e. object to box, box to couch). Thus, changes in landmark usage and knowledge
during the second year of life seem to parallel changes seen in domains more
traditionally thought of as symbolic.
The chapter on landmark development that probably opens with the onset of self-
produced locomotion, does not close for a long while. In fact, there is probably
continual development across the lifespan as individuals learn to deal with landmarks
even more ‘distanced’ from their referents (in maps or on a compass) or more
complex in the spatial relations they convey. Clearly systems of landmarks also
become important components of spatial cognition, so that the role of the single
landmark that was such a milestone for the infant, takes on the aura of ‘mere’
topological spatial notion-a primitive in the Piagetian scheme of things spatial. But
to the infant it was a milestone-and therefore, I would argue, a landmark worthy of
note.

Landmarks and the coordination and

integration of spatial information

Herbert L. Pick, Jr.

lnstitnte of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, M N 55455, U S A

Daniel R. Monte110 and Susan C. Somerville

Ariqona State University

About 10 years ago Pick, Yonas & Rieser (1979) suggested that a single landmark
might be a minimal frame of reference. Since that time, Rieser (personal communica-
tion) has argued that while logically it might be possible to consider a single
landmark a frame of reference, practically speaking a frame of reference implies
multiple landmarks organized or perhaps perceived as a system.
The question of exactly what constitutes landmark information seems most
approachable through the consideration of how landmarks are used. If we ask ‘What
is a landmark?’, we find that the term sometimes applies to the prototypical case of a
stationary object marking a fixed position in a space, but that there are also
applications of the term to moving objects such as the sun, and to fixed objects (e.g. a
high-water mark) whose purpose is to indicate the position of something that moves
such as the incoming tide. The resulting impasse is reminiscent of the one that
Goodman (1978) describes in connection with the question ‘What is art?’, and there
seem also to be parallel advantages to adopting Goodman’s solution, which was to
change the question. In our case the question becomes ‘When is a landmark?’.