Wayfinding Behavior and Spatial Knowledge of Adults and Children in a Virtual Environment: The Role of the Environmental Structure

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of regularity in environmental structure on wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge. A total of 60 participants (7- to 8-year-olds, 11- to12-year-olds, and adults) performed self-determined movements in a desktop virtual environment. In almost all measurements of wayfinding performance and spatial knowledge an overall developmental progress from younger children to adults was found. In contrast, exploration behavior did not differ between adults and children Furthermore, the environmental structure tended to influence only the wayfinding performance of younger children, but did not have any effect on the exploration behavior and the spatial knowledge of children or adults. This outcome supports the idea of a dissociation between exploration behavior, wayfinding performance and spatial knowledge as distinct aspects of spatial cognition.

How useful are landmarks when learning a route in a virtual environment? Evidence from typical development and Williams syndrome

“…This distinction supports Jansen-Osmann and colleagues' distinction between wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge. They reported that the use of color and symmetry in a virtual environment affects wayfinding behavior but not spatial knowledge (Jansen-Osmann et al, 2007;Jansen-Osmann & Wiedenbauer, 2004b). In our study, we suggested that binding ability (i.e., the ability to associate visual scene information with spatial direction information) is learned across conditions and that the TD group, but not the WS group, also learned to inhibit erroneous responses (perseverative errors) across conditions for this group.…”

“…More recently, a qualitative difference between the first two stages (landmark knowledge and route knowledge) has been challenged, and many now favor a model of continuous development of route-learning ability, with the only qualitative change occurring during the integration of learned places, to form a cognitive map (Montello, 1998). Furthermore, Jansen-Osmann and colleagues (Jansen-Osmann & Fuchs, 2006;Jansen-Osmann, Schmid, & Heil, 2007) differentiated between the cognitive representations formed during the stages described above and the perceptual-motor learning required to build such representations. They defined the cognitive system of internal representations as spatial knowledge and the perceptual-motor learning as wayfinding behavior.…”

“…We were interested in whether participants differentiated between ''useful'' and ''less useful'' landmarks and the relative salience of landmark position versus landmark identity. Using Jansen-Osmann and colleagues' terminology (Jansen-Osmann & Fuchs, 2006;Jansen-Osmann et al, 2007), we measured wayfinding behavior by recording the number of learning trials required and the number of errors made while learning a route, and we assessed landmark knowledge (a feature of spatial knowledge) by measuring participants' recall of landmarks. This study is the first to use virtual environments with people with WS and the first to explore knowledge of landmark usefulness in TD children as young as 6 years.…”

Empirical evaluation of virtual environment technology as an experimental tool in developmental spatial cognition research

“…Computer experience was not further analysed because none of our other studies showed any influence of computer experience on the measurements obtained (compare Jansen-Osmann & Fuchs, 2006; Jansen-Osmann, Schmid, & Heil, 2007a, 2007bJansen-Osmann & Wiedenbauer, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c.…”

Volunteered Drone Imagery: Challenges and constraints to the development of an open shared image repository

“…OSM relies on a global community of contributors to create and edit geospatial content depicting largely built characteristics of the earth's surface (roads, buildings, and infrastructure). Since the founding of OSM in 2004, a significant amount of research on both the community of users [14], [64], data available via OSM [65]- [67], and the process and politics of its use [68] has been produced. This literature provides context for the development of a user-contributed imagery repository, outlining key concerns such as data quality [34], [56], [69], [70], licensing and reuse [62], [27].…”