The results showed that children as young as 5 years of age successfully applied an imagery strategy
in an action task where the glasses could be tilted with visual control. In a judgment task, however,
all age groups showed markedly lower performance. Furthermore, results showed that visual
information had a beneficial effect on imagery performance. However, even with available visual
information, younger children depended on executed movements and motor feedback to imagine
the events. These results indicate that motor activities are particularly important in imagery performance
of younger children. As children develop, transforming mental representations becomes
increasingly flexible and depends less on motor activity. In the following, we discuss these results
in more detail and compare them with existing claims regarding the development of mental representations.
Finally, we provide some practical implications of our results.