Development of allocentric spatial recall from new viewpoints in virtual reality

Abstract

Using landmarks and other scene features to recall locations from new viewpoints is a critical skill in spatial cognition. In an immersive virtual reality task, we asked children 3.5–4.5 years old to remember the location of a target using various cues. On some trials they could use information from their own self‐motion. On some trials they could use a view match. In the very hardest kind of trial, they were ‘teleported’ to a new viewpoint and could only use an allocentric spatial representation. This approach provides a strict test for allocentric coding (without either a matching viewpoint or self‐motion information) while avoiding additional task demands in previous studies (it does not require them to deal with a small table‐top environment or to manage stronger cue conflicts). Both the younger and older groups were able to point back at the target location better than chance when they could use view matching and/or self‐motion, but allocentric recall was only seen in the older group (4.0–4.5). In addition, we only obtained evidence for a specific kind of allocentric recall in the older group: they tracked one major axis of the space significantly above chance, r(158) = .28, but not the other, r(158) = −.01. We conclude that there is a major qualitative change in coding for spatial recall around the fourth birthday, potentially followed by further development towards fully flexible recall from new viewpoints.

Navigation and the developing brain

“…required for inertial navigation, did not use visual cues to localize an object until the age of 4 years (Negen et al, 2018), thus indicating that success at earlier ages may require the presence of inertial cues. However, the task used in this study was more complex than the twochoice tasks used with babies, and children had to code distances from somewhat undistinctive visual landmarks.…”

Alice in Wonderland: The effects of body size and movement on children’s size perception and body representation in virtual reality

“…Additionally, young children have been shown to encode their environment in relation to their own body (egocentrically) instead of using external landmarks (Negen, Heywood-Everett, Roome, & Nardini, 2017). Therefore, it could be predicted that children's size perceptions would be affected by perceived body size to an even greater extent than those of adults.…”

“…Additionally, since children's bodies change size frequently, it was thought that children would embody a virtual body regardless of its size. It was also predicted that children's size estimations would be more affected by perceived body size than those of adults, due to a bias towards egocentric processing (Negen et al, 2017). Experiment 2 was designed to directly address whether changes in body size lead to changes in the perceived size of the environment, or of the body itself.…”

“…In both experiments, we used fully immersive virtual reality (VR) to manipulate the visuomotor synchrony (Experiment 1) and body size (Experiments 1 & 2) of a virtual body in a group of 5-year-olds and adults. 5-year-olds were chosen because children of this age show an effect of visuotactile synchrony in the RHI (Cowie et al, 2013) and are one of the youngest age groups to respond well to our fully-immersive VR set-up (Negen et al, 2017).…”

An Adaptive Cue Selection Model of Allocentric Spatial Reorientation

“…Instead, we adapt a method from our previous studies (Negen, Heywood-Everett, Roome, & Nardini, 2018;Negen, Roome, Keenaghan, & Nardini, 2018). Virtual reality is used to make the trials faster and to make the task more engaging.…”