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

Abstract

The study compared developmental aspects of spatial knowledge acquisition in a real and a virtual large-scale environment according to the classical study of Cohen and Schuepfer (1980) with 40 younger children (7–8 years old), 40 older children (11–12 years old), and 40 adults. All participants learned the correct route through a maze, recalled the inherent landmarks, and drew a map of the maze. The results revealed equivalent age effects for these tasks in the real and the virtual world. In both conditions younger children needed more trials to learn the route and showed less configurational knowledge than older children and adults. Age group performance on landmark recollection did not differ in either the virtual or the real world maze. Except for the map drawing task performance was always worse in the virtual world condition. Because the developmental process was comparable in real and virtual environments, the results support the use of virtual environments for the research on developmental aspects of spatial knowledge.

Keywords:

• Spatial cognition development
• Virtual environments
• Children and adults

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grant JA 889 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Science Foundation) to Petra Jansen-Osmann. The authors wish to thank all student assistants of our working group, all children and their parents.