REPRESENTATION OF DEPTH BY CHILDREN - SPATIAL STRATEGIES AND LATERAL BIASES

Preschool and elementary-school children from the United States and Is rael represented depth relations in pictures. A lateral bias to place near objects on the left side appeared in English and Hebrew readers o f all ages and in older Arabic readers: this bias is consistent with l eft-right asymmetries observed in Western art. The overall directional ity of notational systems was seen as constraining, but not causing, t he left bias. In all cultural groups, young children represented near- far by horizontal alignments and older children, by diagonal alignment s, with virtually no vertical alignments. Front-behind representations followed a different developmental course that was interpreted as due to efforts to convey nearness between the items separated in depth.