Representation of depth by children: Spatial strategies and lateral biases.

Preschool and elementary-school children from the US and Israel represented depth relations in pictures. A lateral bias to place near objects on the left side appeared in English and Hebrew readers of all ages and in older Arabic readers; this bias is consistent with left–right asymmetries observed in Western art. The overall directionality of notational systems was seen as constraining, but not causing, the left bias. In all cultural groups, young children represented near–far by horizontal alignments and older children, by diagonal alignments, 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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)