Development of Landmark Use for Navigation in Children: Effects of Age, Sex, Working Memory and Landmark Type

Abstract

The use of landmarks for navigation develops throughout childhood. Here, we examined the developmental trajectory of egocentric and allocentric navigation based on landmark information in an on-screen virtual environment in 39 5-6-year-olds, 43 7-8-year-olds, and 41 9-10-year-olds. We assessed both categorical performance, indicating the notion of location changes based on the landmarks, as well as metrical performance relating to the precision of the representation of the environment. We investigated whether age, sex, spatial working memory, verbal working memory, and verbal production of left and right contributed to the development of navigation skills. In egocentric navigation, Categorical performance was already above chance at 5 years of age and was positively related to visuo-spatial working memory and the production of left/right, whereas metrical performance was only related to age. Allocentric navigation started to develop between 5 and 8 years of age and was related to sex, with boys outperforming girls. Both boys and girls seemed to rely more on directional landmark information as compared to positional landmark information. To our knowledge, this study is the first to give insight into the relative contribution of different cognitive abilities to navigation skills in school-aged children.

Keywords: development; individual differences; spatial cues; spatial navigation; virtual reality; working memory.

Figure 1

The navigation task: (A) Time course of a trial; (B) snapshots of the starting position for crossed cue types (combined, positional, and directional) with rotation between encoding and returning phases (0, 90, and 180 degrees); (C) Two trials from one participant depicted from a birds eye perspective. The red and green dots represent the columns. The yellow triangle represents the location of the ball in the encoding phase. The green diamond represents the starting location in the encoding phase, and the red diamond represents the starting location in the returning phase. The purple star represents the location where the ball was placed in the returning phase. The circular lines were not visible in the environment. Letters a–d represent possible starting locations during encoding and returning.

Figure 1

The navigation task: (A) Time course of a trial; (B) snapshots of the starting position for crossed cue types (combined, positional, and directional) with rotation between encoding and returning phases (0, 90, and 180 degrees); (C) Two trials from one participant depicted from a birds eye perspective. The red and green dots represent the columns. The yellow triangle represents the location of the ball in the encoding phase. The green diamond represents the starting location in the encoding phase, and the red diamond represents the starting location in the returning phase. The purple star represents the location where the ball was placed in the returning phase. The circular lines were not visible in the environment. Letters a–d represent possible starting locations during encoding and returning.

Figure 2

Results for all Age *Sex groups on the cue types and rotations displaying means and standard errors. (A,C) present the retrieval errors in Blender units. (B,D) present the categorical errors in proportions. The horizontal line in (B,D) represents the chance level with bars higher than this level representing at/lower than chance level.