Left or Right? Preschoolers’ Spatial Skills Reveal Surprising Gaps

Ask a four-year-old to describe where the cat is sitting and you may get a perfectly confident answer: the cat is on the rock, behind the windmill, or inside the fence. Ask that same child to put a toy horse to the left of a cow, and everything changes. A new study published in the International Journal of Early Childhood suggests that this asymmetry is not a quirk of a few children but a fundamental feature of how spatial thinking develops in the preschool years—and that our current ways of assessing it may be missing the most important structure.

The research, conducted by Artemis Eleftheriadi and Konstantinos Lavidas of the University of Patras together with Panagiotis Gridos of the University of the Aegean, set out to rethink how spatial skills in young children are assessed. Rather than treating spatial ability as a single, monolithic capacity measured by paper-and-pencil tests, the team built a typology grounded in spatial relations and informed by the widely used learning trajectories framework of Clements and Sarama. The central idea is simple but powerful: what children can do with space depends critically on the type of spatial relation involved—positional, directional, referential, or representational—and assessment should capture those distinctions rather than collapse them into one score.

To test whether such a typology could actually work in a real classroom, the researchers carried out a qualitative case study with twenty-four children aged four to six years in a kindergarten setting. The design was deliberately close to everyday early childhood practice. Instead of standardized testing conditions, children engaged in a sequence of structured, play-based activities built around a farm scene, featuring animals, a barn, a windmill, fences, a maze, and a friendly farmer character named Dimitris. Through a Simon-says-style game, children were asked to place animals in front of themselves or behind themselves, on their own right or left, or relative to Dimitris and other objects. They then navigated a three-dimensional maze, giving verbal directions such as take two steps forward and turn right. Finally, they worked with maps and a gridded coordinate surface, reading locations from a floor plan, transferring objects onto a model, and even drawing their own maps of the farm.

This approach allowed the researchers to combine task performance data with a fine-grained qualitative examination of children’s responses. Crucially, the activities crossed two dimensions that spatial cognition researchers have long considered essential: the reference system involved and the kind of representation demanded. Egocentric tasks required children to encode space from their own point of view, while allocentric tasks required them to adopt the perspective of another person or object. Some tasks relied on spatial language alone, while others demanded the interpretation and construction of spatial representations such as maps and models. The typology organized these demands into a coherent framework that could be operationalized by teachers, not just by laboratory researchers.

The findings paint a strikingly consistent picture of the preschool spatial landscape. Basic positional relations were largely developed: most children could reliably identify what was inside or outside, above or below, in front of or behind, and near or far. But directional relations were a different story. Right and left, in particular, remained problematic across the sample, echoing a long-standing finding in developmental psychology that the distinction between these two directions is one of the last spatial concepts to consolidate and one of the most persistent sources of error in early childhood.

The contrast between egocentric and allocentric performance was equally clear. Children were markedly more successful when tasks let them anchor spatial judgments in their own bodies. When the reference system shifted—to the farmer Dimitris, to an animal on the model, or to an abstract coordinate grid defined by numbers and colors—performance dropped. This result aligns with decades of theory distinguishing perspective-taking from self-based coding, but the study’s classroom setting shows that the gap is visible in ordinary educational activities, not just in controlled laboratory experiments. For teachers, it means that a child who seems spatially competent during movement games may genuinely struggle when the same relations must be computed from another viewpoint.

Perhaps the most revealing difficulties emerged when children had to coordinate multiple spatial relations at once. Navigation through the maze required chaining directional decisions—move forward, then turn, then move again—into a coherent sequence. Map-based activities required mapping relations on a two-dimensional plan onto a three-dimensional model and vice versa, holding the relational structure stable across surfaces. Here, many children who could recognize a map as a map nonetheless failed to maintain the relational structure it encoded: they could identify the depicted objects but misplace them, swap directions, or lose track of the correspondence between the plan and the model. Recognition, in other words, far outpaced relational construction.

That distinction may be the study’s most important conceptual contribution. The researchers observed that although many children recognized spatial representations, fewer were able to maintain their relational structure. This suggests that early spatial assessment, if it stops at recognition, will systematically overestimate what children actually understand. A relational approach—asking whether a child can use a representation to carry out a transformation, preserve correspondences, or coordinate two reference systems—gives a far more accurate and educationally useful picture. It also connects directly to the broader evidence base: spatial skills are strongly linked to later mathematics achievement, and meta-analyses of training studies show that spatial ability is highly malleable in early childhood. Identifying precisely which relational skills are lagging gives educators a concrete target for intervention rather than a vague deficit label.

The study also carries practical implications for curriculum design. Its activities were aligned with widely adopted standards, such as describing, naming, and interpreting relative positions in space and finding and naming locations in coordinate systems such as maps. The typology offers teachers a diagnostic lens: a class may be fluent with positional language but shaky on direction, or confident with egocentric commands but lost with maps. Because the framework is grounded in a respected learning trajectories approach, it can guide not only assessment but also the sequencing of instruction, moving children from body-anchored relations toward increasingly abstract and coordinated systems.

Limitations remain, as the authors would acknowledge. The sample was small, the setting a single kindergarten, and the design qualitative—so the findings are a proof of concept for the typology rather than a population-level description. Data from the study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, and the research was supported by the Andreas Mentzelopoulos Foundation. Still, the message is clear and, for a field increasingly focused on early STEM foundations, timely: spatial relations are the load-bearing structure of preschool spatial thinking, and assessments that ignore that structure risk misreading what young children know. The left–right confusions, the egocentric crutch, and the fragile relational grip on maps are not failures to be stamped out but signposts pointing to the next step in each child’s spatial learning trajectory.

Subject of Research: A relational typology for assessing spatial skills in preschool children

Article Title: Rethinking the Assessment of Preschoolers’ Spatial Skills: A Typology Based on Spatial Relations

Article References: Rethinking the Assessment of Preschoolers’ Spatial Skills: A Typology Based on Spatial Relations. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-026-00554-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13158-026-00554-5

Keywords: spatial skills, preschool education, spatial relations, spatial assessment, egocentric reference frame, allocentric reference frame, spatial language, navigation, map use, early childhood, learning trajectories, mathematics achievement