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Accumulating evidence demonstrates that humans and other animals use geometric information, such as the shape of a surrounding space, to recover from disorientation. Less clear is to what extent human children integrate geometry with featural cues, such as the color of walls within an enclosed space, for this purpose. One view holds that reorientation relies on a cognitive module that processes geometric information independently of features. Here we provide evidence against this position by demonstrating that prior exposure to features within a kite-shaped space facilitated the use of geometry in 3- and 4-year-old children, as has been shown with nonhuman animals. Children were tasked with localizing a hidden object within a kite space following disorientation. Their performance was compared across two blocks of trials. We found that children first exposed to features (two black walls and two white walls) within the kite space (first block) were subsequently better at relying on the space's geometry to localize the target object (second block) than children not previously exposed to features. Follow-up experiments ruled out nonspecific effects of practice and attention. Not only did featural cues interact with the processing of geometry, but also features specifically enhanced children's representations of the space's geometry, which they used for reorientation. We suggest that this potentiation of geometry was possible because the placement of wall colors highlighted the major axis of the kite space, which may be critical for aiding the encoding of global shape or for maintaining the representation of a complex geometry in memory.

Humans rely on two main systems of quantification - one is non-symbolic and involves approximate number representations (known as the approximate number system or ANS), the other is symbolic and allows for exact calculations of number. Despite the pervasiveness of the ANS across development, recent studies with adolescents and school-aged children point to individual differences in the precision of these representations, which, importantly, have been shown to relate to symbolic math competence, even after controlling for general aspects of intelligence. Such findings suggest that the ANS, which humans share with nonhuman animals, interfaces specifically with a uniquely human system of formal mathematics. Other findings, however, point to a less straightforward picture, leaving open questions about the nature and ontogenetic origins of the relation between these two systems. Testing children across the preschool period, we found that ANS precision correlated with early math achievement, but, critically, that this relation was non-linear. More specifically, the correlation between ANS precision and math competence was stronger for children with lower math scores than for children with higher math scores. Taken together, our findings suggest that early-developing connections between the ANS and mathematics may be fundamentally discontinuous. Possible mechanisms underlying such non-linearity are discussed.