Lingwood, Jamie and Blades, Mark and Farran, Emily K. and Courbois, Yannick and Matthews, Danielle (2015) Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. ISSN 1664-1078
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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
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information and Comments: | Copyright © 2015 Lingwood, Blades, Farran, Courbois and Matthews. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology |
| Depositing User: | Jamie Lingwood |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Mar 2023 14:19 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Mar 2023 14:19 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3759 |
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