ADULTS FAILURES ON EUCLIDEAN AND PROJECTIVE SPATIAL TASKS - IMPLICATIONS FOR CHARACTERIZING SPATIAL COGNITION

In their initial study of the development of children's spatial concep ts, Piaget and Inhelder (1956) designed the ''water-level'' and ''plum b-line'' tasks to assess children's Euclidean abilities to perceive an d represent horizontals and verticals. Surprisingly, subsequent resear ch has shown that many adults perform badly on these tasks designed fo r children. Here we studied whether adults (N = 160) would also have d ifficulty on a shadow projection task developed to assess theoreticall y related projective spatial concepts, The data showed that some adult s had difficulty on the shadow task, whether tested by a drawing or by a selection task, and whether scored with respect to qualitative shap e or metric accuracy. Performance was significantly worse on complex t han simple forms, and when sex differences emerged, they favored males . As hypothesized, the best predictor of shadow performance was perfor mance on the Euclidean tasks. Scores on the Embedded Figures Test and participant sex accounted for small (but significant) additional varia nce on shadow performance. Implications for theories of spatial develo pment and for modeling individual differences in spatial cognition are discussed.