Wayfinding Behavior and Spatial Knowledge of Adults and Children in a Virtual Environment

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of different organizations of landmark-location pairings as fine-space information on wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge on a total of 90 participants: 30 second graders, 30 sixth graders, and 30 adults. All participants had to find their way to a goal in a virtual environment with either randomized or categorical landmarks, or without any landmarks. Thereafter, they had to find the shortest way from the start position to the goal in two consecutive trials (wayfinding performance), and they had to solve a number of spatial knowledge tasks. The results showed that independent of their categorical function, the existence of landmarks influenced the way-finding performance of adults and children in the same way. Whereas the presence of landmarks had no effect on spatial survey knowledge, landmark knowledge itself was influenced by the categorical function of the landmarks presented. Moreover, second graders showed limited achievement compared to adults independent of the existence of landmarks. The main results implicate firstly that children at school age indeed are able to use landmark-location pairings as fine-space information like adults during learning an unknown environmental space, and secondly that a dissociation between wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge might exist.

The effect of landmark and body-based sensory information on route knowledge

“…Local landmarks did reduce participants' errors, a finding that is consistent with previous research in which participants learned a route in one direction (Jansen-Osmann & Fuchs, 2006) and that adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that landmarks primarily facilitate traveling between specific places rather than learning the overall layout of a space (Ruddle, 2005). Local landmarks primarily provided positional information, which directly addressed the most common type of error that participants made (incorrectly traveling straight on), although it should be noted that there was no interaction between error type and landmarks.…”

“…For example, local landmarks had no effect when participants navigated a virtual building to find targets in any order (Ruddle, 2005), and when the target order was specified, navigation improved only if the landmarks were everyday objects instead of abstract patterns (Ruddle, Payne, & Jones 1997). However, adding object landmarks to an environment halved the number of trials that participants required to learn the shortest route in one direction between two places (Jansen-Osmann & Fuchs, 2006). Therefore, we hypothesized that adding local landmarks to an environment would also reduce the overall number of errors that participants made when they traversed a route, because they would more often turn in the correct place.…”

Walking improves your cognitive map in environments that are large-scale and large in extent

“…However, although landmarks do assist route learning [Jansen-Osmann and Fuchs 2006; in press], they provide much less benefit than is commonly assumed when the overall layout of a space needs to be learned [Ruddle and Lessels 2009;Ruddle et al 1997]. Learning an environment's layout is a fundamental part of forming an accurate cognitive map.…”

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

“…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.…”