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Lingwood J, Blades M, Farran EK, et al. Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment. Front Psychol. 2015;6:174doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174.
Lingwood, J., Blades, M., Farran, E. K., Courbois, Y., & Matthews, D. (2015). Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment. Frontiers in psychology, 6174. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174
Lingwood, Jamie, et al. "Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment." Frontiers in psychology vol. 6 (2015): 174. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174
Lingwood J, Blades M, Farran EK, Courbois Y, Matthews D. Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment. Front Psychol. 2015 Mar 12;6:174. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174. eCollection 2015. PMID: 25814960; PMCID: PMC4357248.
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Front Psychol. 2015 Mar 12;6:174. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174. eCollection 2015.

Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment.

Frontiers in psychology

Jamie Lingwood, Mark Blades, Emily K Farran, Yannick Courbois, Danielle Matthews

Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK.
  2. Department of Psychology and Human Development, Institute of Education London, UK.
  3. Laboratoire PSITEC, EDL3, Department of Psychology, Université Lille Nord de France Lille, France.

PMID: 25814960 PMCID: PMC4357248 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174

Abstract

Wayfinding is defined as the ability to learn and remember a route through an environment. Previous researchers have shown that young children have difficulties remembering routes. However, very few researchers have considered how to improve young children's wayfinding abilities. Therefore, we investigated ways to help children increase their wayfinding skills. In two studies, a total of 72 5-year olds were shown a route in a six turn maze in a virtual environment and were then asked to retrace this route by themselves. A unique landmark was positioned at each junction and each junction was made up of two paths: a correct path and an incorrect path. Two different strategies improved route learning performance. In Experiment 1, verbally labeling on-route junction landmarks during the first walk reduced the number of errors and the number of trials to reach a learning criterion when the children retraced the route. In Experiment 2, encouraging children to attend to on-route junction landmarks on the first walk reduced the number of errors when the route was retraced. This was the first study to show that very young children can be taught route learning skills. The implications of our results are discussed.

Keywords: landmarks; navigational strategies; route learning; virtual environments; wayfinding

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