Humans typically use three kinds of spatial reference system to understand the world: the relative reference frame, the absolute reference frame, and the intrinsic reference frame. In the current study, we used a reconstruction task (the animals-in-a-row task) to examine the development of the spatial reference system in children. Japanese and Chinese children aged 3-5 years participated in experiments to examined whether Japanese and Chinese children utilized different reference frames in a reconstruction task and whether children utilized different reference frames when the experimenter’s position was changed. The results revealed that Chinese children using relative or absolute reference frame increased with age and the other responses decreased with age. However, in Japanese children only the other responses decreased with age. In addition, both Japanese and Chinese children tended to use absolute reference frames when the experimenter was in an absolute position, and they tended to use the relative reference frame when the experimenter was in a relative position.