Landmark and route knowledge in children's spatial representation of a virtual environment

Abstract

This study investigates the development of landmark and route knowledge in complex wayfinding situations. It focuses on how children (aged 6, 8, and 10 years) and young adults (n = 79) indicate, recognize, and bind landmarks and directions in both verbal and visuo-spatial tasks after learning a virtual route. Performance in these tasks is also related to general verbal and visuo-spatial abilities as assessed by independent standardized tests (attention, working memory, perception of direction, production and comprehension of spatial terms, sentences and stories). The results first show that the quantity and quality of landmarks and directions produced and recognized by participants in both verbal and visuo-spatial tasks increased with age. In addition, an increase with age was observed in participants' selection of decisional landmarks (i.e., landmarks associated with a change of direction), as well as in their capacity to bind landmarks and directions. Our results support the view that children first acquire landmark knowledge, then route knowledge, as shown by their late developing ability to bind knowledge of directions and landmarks. Overall, the quality of verbal and visuo-spatial information in participants' spatial representations was found to vary mostly with their visuo-spatial abilities (attention and perception of directions) and not with their verbal abilities. Interestingly, however, when asked to recognize landmarks encountered during the route, participants show an increasing bias with age toward choosing a related landmark of the same category, regardless of its visual characteristics, i.e., they incorrectly choose the picture of another fountain. The discussion highlights the need for further studies to determine more precisely the role of verbal and visuo-spatial knowledge and the nature of how children learn to represent and memorize routes.

Keywords: cognitive development; decisional landmark; individual differences; language abilities; verbal encoding; virtual reality; visuo-spatial encoding; wayfinding.

FIGURE 1

The virtual town: a view on a pedestrian path with some people walking, buildings, and street furniture.

FIGURE 2

Map of the environment with the route (in black), the landmarks used in the recognition task (numbers in white), and the landmarks additionally mentioned by the participants in their verbal descriptions (letters in grey).

FIGURE 3

Example of the three types of pictures used in the visual recognition task: target (the fountain encountered during the route), related distractor (another fountain that was visually different), unrelated distractor (an entity that was verbally and visually different from the target).

FIGURE 4

Example of a picture in the direction-choosing task.

FIGURE 5

Order of the route tasks.

FIGURE 6

Mean scores for decisional and confirmation landmarks-V.

FIGURE 7

Accuracy ratio for targets, related and unrelated distractors by age.

FIGURE 8

Mean number of mentions of crossroads and orientations in verbal descriptions.

FIGURE 9

Mean scores for crossroads-M and orientations-M indicated on the map.