Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment.

Jamie Lingwood,Yannick Courbois,Emily K Farran,Danielle Matthews,Mark Blades

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174

Jamie Lingwood, Yannick Courbois + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174

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Abstract

Wayfinding is defined as the ability to learn and remember a route through an environment. Previous researchers have shown that young children have difficulties remembering routes. However, very few researchers have considered how to improve young children's wayfinding abilities. Therefore, we investigated ways to help children increase their wayfinding skills. In two studies, a total of 72 5-year olds were shown a route in a six turn maze in a virtual environment and were then asked to retrace this route by themselves. A unique landmark was positioned at each junction and each junction was made up of two paths: a correct path and an incorrect path. Two different strategies improved route learning performance. In Experiment 1, verbally labeling on-route junction landmarks during the first walk reduced the number of errors and the number of trials to reach a learning criterion when the children retraced the route. In Experiment 2, encouraging children to attend to on-route junction landmarks on the first walk reduced the number of errors when the route was retraced. This was the first study to show that very young children can be taught route learning skills. The implications of our results are discussed.

Highlights

Psychologists have long been interested in the development of visuospatial abilities (Acredolo, 1977, 1978; Hermer and Spelke, 1994; Nardini et al, 2009; Bullens et al, 2010) and a number of tasks have been used to investigate children’s visuospatial abilities such as the reorientation task, the Corsi span task (Corsi, 1972) and the Shapes test (Baddeley et al, 1994)
Experiment 1 showed that when landmarks were verbally labeled by an experimenter children’s ability to find their way through a novel route in a virtual environment (VE) improved
In other words, encouraging young children to attend to critical landmarks improved their ability to learn a novel route in a VE

Summary

Introduction

Psychologists have long been interested in the development of visuospatial abilities (Acredolo, 1977, 1978; Hermer and Spelke, 1994; Nardini et al, 2009; Bullens et al, 2010) and a number of tasks have been used to investigate children’s visuospatial abilities such as the reorientation task, the Corsi span task (Corsi, 1972) and the Shapes test (Baddeley et al, 1994). Wayfinding is a specific spatial ability that is measured by investigating the ability to learn and remember a novel route through an environment (Blades, 1991). There is some evidence for this theory (e.g., Evans et al, 1981; Cousins et al, 1983; Blades, 1991; Montello, 1998; Ishikawa and Montello, 2006) and evidence that the ability to use landmarks is essential for children’s ability to learn and remember novel routes (Acredolo et al, 1975; Cornell et al, 1989, 1992, 1994; Kitchin and Blades, 2002; JansenOsmann and Wiedenbauer, 2004; Farran et al, 2012a; Courbois et al, 2013)

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