Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, 60 Township Line Road, Elkins Park, PA, USA.
Psychology Department, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2021 Apr;49(3):572-585. doi: 10.3758/s13421-020-01111-8. Epub 2020 Oct 27.
The relative contribution of different sources of information for spatial updating - keeping track of one's position in an environment - has been highly debated. Further, children and adults may differ in their reliance on visual versus body-based information for spatial updating. In two experiments, we tested children (age 10-12 years) and young adult participants on a virtual point-to-origin task that varied the types of self-motion information available for translation: full-dynamic (walking), visual-dynamic (controller induced), and no-dynamic (teleporting). In Experiment 1, participants completed the three conditions in an indoor virtual environment with visual landmark cues. Adults were more accurate in the full- and visual-dynamic conditions (which did not differ from each other) compared to the no-dynamic condition. In contrast, children were most accurate in the visual-dynamic condition and also least accurate in the no-dynamic condition. Adults outperformed children in all conditions. In Experiment 2, we removed the potential for relying on visual landmarks by running the same paradigm in an outdoor virtual environment with no geometrical room cues. As expected, adults' errors increased in all conditions, but performance was still relatively worse in teleporting. Surprisingly, children showed overall similar accuracy and patterns across locomotion conditions to adults. Together, the results support the importance of dynamic translation information (either visual or body-based) for spatial updating across both age groups, but suggest children may be more reliant on visual information than adults.
不同信息源对空间更新（跟踪人在环境中的位置）的相对贡献一直存在高度争议。此外，儿童和成人在依赖视觉信息还是基于身体的信息进行空间更新方面可能存在差异。在两项实验中，我们在虚拟的点对点原点任务上测试了儿童（10-12 岁）和年轻成人参与者，该任务改变了可用于平移的自我运动信息类型：全动态（步行）、视觉动态（控制器诱导）和无动态（瞬移）。在实验 1 中，参与者在具有视觉地标线索的室内虚拟环境中完成了这三种条件。与无动态条件相比，成人在全动态和视觉动态条件下（彼此之间没有差异）更准确。相比之下，儿童在视觉动态条件下最准确，在无动态条件下最不准确。成人在所有条件下都优于儿童。在实验 2 中，我们通过在没有几何房间线索的户外虚拟环境中运行相同的范式，消除了依赖视觉地标物的可能性。正如预期的那样，成人在所有条件下的错误都增加了，但在瞬移时的表现仍然相对较差。令人惊讶的是，儿童在所有运动条件下的整体准确性和模式与成人相似。总之，结果支持了动态平移信息（无论是视觉信息还是基于身体的信息）对两个年龄段的空间更新的重要性，但表明儿童可能比成人更依赖视觉信息。
