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By Root 815 0

and her woodland friends whistle cheerfully along with her as she makes breakfast. But—how do I put this?—a good sense of direction is not foremost among her many outstanding qualities. On a recent trip to Paris, she took us the wrong direction on the Métro so many times that I eventually had to take over the pathfinding, even though it was my first time in Paris but she used to live there. Her uncanny inaccuracy does have one useful application, though: if I’m lost while driving, I can always ask her which way she thinks we should go at an intersection and then turn in the exact opposite direction.

But we have a family trip planned to visit some friends in Washington, D.C., and I’m determined to give Mindy a second chance. So I haul out a road atlas one Friday night (weekends can get pretty wild in the Jennings house!) and we study the lay of the land. Greater D.C. is a bit of a navigational nightmare, with those diagonal state-named avenues colliding with the other streets at weird angles. (Scientists know that humans aren’t terribly good at grokking diagonals—we have neurons in our brains that are biased toward horizontal and vertical arrangements, and they vastly outnumber the diagonal ones.*) But we plan on spending plenty of our trip down by the National Mall, which is a perfect test case: small, dense, orderly, with notable landmarks in every cardinal direction.† On the map, we take careful note of where the monuments are, where the Metro stops are, how the lettered and numbered streets are ordered.

We drill relentlessly. “Mindy, you’re standing at the Air and Space Museum facing the National Gallery! Point to Capitol Hill! Correct. Which way is the Lincoln Memorial? Correct!”

Rocky music plays. We jump rope, shadowbox with sides of beef.

This little exercise doesn’t take us two weeks; we spend maybe an hour on it. But David Uttal turns out to be right. In D.C., a well-prepared Mindy successfully navigates me and the kids to the White House, the Washington Monument, and many, many Smithsonian food courts. Once, after coming out of the Metro at Federal Triangle, I am disoriented and, after a moment’s hesitation, march us in the wrong direction. Mindy stops and closes her eyes tightly like a Jedi using the Force. “Aren’t the National Archives this way?” she asks, pointing behind us. I don’t believe her, but when we get to the corner I see my mistake.

“Aha, I was right!” she gloats, newly empowered. “It makes me think my sense of direction isn’t actually all that bad. If I cared enough to actually work on it a little.” I imagine that, like the Grinch’s heart, her hippocampus has grown three sizes this day.

Show a map to a three-year-old, and what will the child say? Even without any specific training, there will probably be a basic understanding that the map represents a place. Generally he or she will have no idea what place—one researcher noted that a map of Chicago was often mistaken for Africa, while a map of her young subjects’ home state of Pennsylvania was charmingly identified by one as depicting “California, Canada, and the ‘North Coast.’” They will have trouble understanding angle (an aerial view of a rectangular parking lot might be mistaken for a door) or representation (the states being different colors won’t make much sense to them) or scale (“That line can’t be a road! My car wouldn’t fit on that!”). But they’ll understand that it’s a kind of picture of a place, and that you can use it to get around. Any younger than three, and children can’t even grasp the idea that a piece of paper can stand for an area. If you show toddlers a two-dimensional object like a shadow or a photo, they’ll reach for it as if it were real and rounded. This makes sense, I guess—2-D representations like maps and photos are fairly recent innovations. Evolutionarily, our instincts haven’t caught up yet.

The fact that very young children can understand maps with no training led scientists, for many years, to conclude that there was something innate about the process of mapping—essentially, that all people, regardless of culture,