Large-scale spatial representations are rarely a perfect replication of the corresponding environment. Factors such as age, experience and environmental association play a significant role in each person’s cognitive map. Yet, traditional spatial tasks remove these contextual elements in determining a person’s spatial orientation skill, which has contributed to the apparent widening gap in spatial skills for children in non-urban areas. In this study we examined children’s sketch maps of their route between home and school from four geographically diverse sites (urban, regional, rural, and remote Indigenous communities). Our findings suggest children from rural and remote communities possess highly detailed and sophisticated mental representations of their local environment, outside of traditional developmental frameworks. This work provides insights into these representations through student work samples. We suggest future work consider the contextual nature of spatial skills when comparing students.

大型空间表示很少能完美复制相应的环境。年龄，经验和环境关联等因素在每个人的认知图中都起着重要作用。然而，传统的空间任务在确定一个人的空间定向技能时消除了这些背景因素，这导致了非城市地区儿童空间技能的明显拉大差距。在这项研究中，我们检查了儿童从四个地理位置（城市，区域，农村和偏远的土著社区）到家庭和学校之间路线的草图。我们的研究结果表明，来自农村和偏远社区的儿童在传统的发展框架之外，对当地环境拥有高度详细和复杂的心理表征。这项工作通过学生工作样本提供了对这些表示的见解。我们建议将来的工作在比较学生时考虑空间技能的上下文性质。