Tuan, Yi-Fu, Spatial experience: Space, place and the Child

Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. "Space, place and the Child." Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 19-33.

Tuan attempts to explore human's common experience of space and place from the learning process of children. He identifies some key features:

0. Human's spatial perception is something acquired or at least a developed ability.
"He feels, but his sensations are not localized in space. The pain is simply there, and he responds to it with crying; he does not seem to locate it in some specific part of his body." (20)

1. Particularly at the early stage of childhood, children's spatial experience is closely related to all sensations and activity, not exclusively to visual sensory.
The infant uses his hands to explore the tactile and geometrical characteristics of his environment. While the mouth tackles the nipple and acquires the feel of buccal space, the hands move busily over the breast. Long before the infant's eyes can focus on a small object and discern its shape his hands will have grasped it and known its physical properties through touch." (21)

"The work of Piaget and his colleagues have repeatedly shown that sensorimotor intelligence precedes conceptual grasp, sometimes by several years." (25)

2. The development of spatial perception and understanding comes from imagination, not only from direct experience.
"Perhaps one reason why young children can accomplish these feats of extrapolation is that they have played with toys. Although children are midgets in the world of adults, they are giants in their own world of toys. They look at toy houses and trains from a height and command their fates like Olympian gods." (27)

"It is not surprising, however, that a child can enjoy news of distant places, for he leads a rich life of fantasy and is at home in fantasyland before adults require him to dwell imaginatively in the real countries of a geography book." (31)

3. Child becomes attached to persons first, and then to objects and eventually to localities. (29)

4. Later, children develop a sense of property in space, particularly in the western countries or the middle class families.
An example of a kid of migrant family in the United States (33)