Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK.
Department of Psychology and Human Development, Institute of Education London, UK.
Front Psychol. 2015 Mar 12;6:174. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00174. eCollection 2015.
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.
寻路是指学习和记住在环境中穿行的路线的能力。先前的研究表明，幼儿在记忆路线方面存在困难。然而，很少有研究人员考虑如何提高幼儿的寻路能力。因此，我们研究了帮助儿童提高寻路技能的方法。在两项研究中，共有 72 名 5 岁儿童在虚拟环境中展示了一个六转迷宫的路线，然后要求他们自己重新走这条路线。在每个路口都设置了一个独特的地标，每个路口由两条路径组成：正确的路径和错误的路径。两种不同的策略提高了路线学习的表现。在实验 1 中，在第一次行走时口头标记路线上的路口地标，减少了儿童在重新走路线时的错误数量和达到学习标准的次数。在实验 2 中，鼓励儿童在第一次行走时注意路线上的路口地标，减少了重新走路线时的错误数量。这是第一项表明可以教授幼儿路线学习技能的研究。我们的研究结果的意义在讨论中得到了阐述。
