title: 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.
authors: INSERM UMR S894 and Laboratoire Mémoire et Cognition, Institut de Psychologie, Université Paris Descartes - Sorbonne Paris-Cité Paris, France ; INSERM UMR S894, Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurosciences Paris, France ; CNRS, Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage, UMR 7023, Université de Paris 8 Paris, France.
authors: Marion
authors: M
authors: Nys
authors: INSERM UMR S894 and Laboratoire Mémoire et Cognition, Institut de Psychologie, Université Paris Descartes - Sorbonne Paris-Cité Paris, France.
authors: Valérie
authors: V
authors: Gyselinck
authors: INSERM UMR S894 and Laboratoire Mémoire et Cognition, Institut de Psychologie, Université Paris Descartes - Sorbonne Paris-Cité Paris, France.
authors: Eric
authors: E
authors: Orriols
authors: CNRS, Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage, UMR 7023, Université de Paris 8 Paris, France.
authors: Maya
authors: M
authors: Hickmann
keywords: cognitive development; decisional landmark; individual differences; language abilities; verbal encoding; virtual reality; visuo-spatial encoding; wayfinding