Abstract
Unlike for other abilities, children do not receive systematic spatial orientation training at school, even though navigational training during adulthood improves spatial skills. We investigated whether navigational training programme (NTP) improved spatial orientation skills in pre-schoolers. We administered 12-week NTP to seventeen 4- to 5-year-old children (training group, TG). The TG children and 17 age-matched children (control group, CG) who underwent standard didactics were tested twice before (T0) and after (T1) the NTP using tasks that tap into landmark, route and survey representations. We determined that the TG participants significantly improved their performances in the most demanding navigational task, which is the task that taps into survey representation. This improvement was significantly higher than that observed in the CG, suggesting that NTP fostered the acquisition of survey representation. Such representation is typically achieved by age seven. This finding suggests that NTP improves performance on higher-level navigational tasks in pre-schoolers.
Highlights
Representing and transforming spatial information are everyday activities that are crucial to moving to a new town, reading and interpreting maps
The present results show that navigational training programme (NTP) enhanced the ability to transform egocentric navigational information in a map-like, allocentric representation of the environment in 4- to 5-year old children
In this study, we found that children who underwent NTP were more proficient in locating landmarks on a map than their peers who did not receive undergo NTP
Summary
Representing and transforming spatial information are everyday activities that are crucial to moving to a new town, reading and interpreting maps. Human navigation requires the ability to mentally transform images from two-dimensional to three-dimensional forms, similar to following a map to reach a goal in a new environment It requires recognizing a place from a different perspective and finding an alternative route when an initial route is interrupted. Neural activity within the brain network underlying human navigation, such as the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) (Boccia et al, 2014, 2016b), has been found to depend on the familiarization and the type of strategy participants adopt in performing a topographical memory task (Boccia et al, 2016a) These findings suggest that these brain areas underlie the shift between different types of environmental knowledge, namely, route and survey knowledge. This result confirms the idea that environmental objects are processed in parallel in different formats and that a proficient shift from one format to another may occur from the first stage of environmental knowledge acquisition (Montello, 1998)
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