Spatial orientation assessment in preschool children: Egocentric and allocentric frameworks

Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 2015

Spatial navigation is an adaptive skill that involves determining the route to a particular goal or location, and then travelling that path. A major component of spatial navigation is spatial reorientation, or the ability to reestablish a sense of direction after being disoriented. The hippocampus is known to be critical for navigating, and has more recently been implicated in reorienting in adults, but relatively little is known about the development of the hippocampus in relation to these large-scale spatial abilities in children. It has been established that, compared to school-aged children, preschool children tend to perform poorly on certain spatial reorientation tasks, suggesting that their hippocampi may not be mature enough to process the demands of such a task. Currently, common techniques used to examine underlying brain activity, such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are not suitable for examining hippocampal development in young children. In the present paper, we argue for the use of eyeblink conditioning (EBC), a relatively under-utilized, inexpensive, and safe method that is easy to implement in developing populations. In addition, EBC has a well defined neural circuitry, which includes the hippocampus, making it an ideal tool to indirectly measure hippocampal functioning in young children. In this review, we will evaluate the literature on EBC and its relation to hippocampal development, and discuss the possibility of using EBC as an objective measure of associative learning in relation to large-scale spatial skills. We support the use of EBC as a way to indirectly access hippocampal function in typical and atypical populations in order to characterize the neural substrates associated with the development of spatial reorientation abilities in early childhood. Thus, we advocate for EBC as a simple biomarker for success in various tasks that require the hippocampus, including spatial reorientation.

Previous spatial cognition studies have shown that young children tended to rely on information about the macroscopic shape of the environment to reorient themselves, whereas they ignored the non-spatial feature information. The present study investigated disoriented four-, five-and six-year-olds searching for a toy in a small rectangular arena, where the spatial layout was manipulated according to geometric properties (sense and length). The results show that children as young as 4 years are able to reorient above chance using wall colour and length together, when not required to rely on the left/right judgement. Furthermore, the evidence we found concerning the relationship between spatial language production and reorientation performance suggests that linguistic abilities might play an important role in enabling older children to build stronger spatial representation combining the available properties of an enclosed space.

Brain Imaging and Behavior, 2019

The ability to orient and navigate in spatial surroundings is a cognitive process that undergoes a prolonged maturation with progression of skills, strategies and proficiency over much of childhood. In the present study, we used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neurological mechanisms underlying the ability to orient in a virtual interior environment in children aged 10 to 12 years of age, a developmental stage in which children start using effective spatial orientation strategies in large-scale surroundings. We found that, in comparison to young adults, children were not as proficient at the spatial orientation task, and revealed increased neural activity in areas of the brain associated with visuospatial processing and navigation (left cuneus and mid occipital area, left inferior parietal region and precuneus, right inferior parietal cortex, right precentral gyrus, cerebellar vermis and bilateral medial cerebellar lobes). When functional connectivity analyses of resting state fMRI data were performed, using seed areas that were associated with performance, increased connectivity was seen in the adults from the right hippocampal/parahippocampal gyrus to the contralateral caudate, the insular cortex, and the posterior supramarginal gyrus; children had increased connectivity from the right paracentral lobule to the right superior frontal gyrus as compared to adults. These findings support the hypothesis that, as children are maturing in their navigation abilities, they are refining and increasing the proficiency of visuospatial skills with a complimentary increase in connectivity of longer-range distributed networks allowing for flexible use of efficient and effective spatial orientation strategies.

Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2001

Research with both rats and human infants has found that after inertial disorientation, the geometry of an enclosed environment is used in preference over distinctive featural information during goal localization. Infants (Homo sapiens, 18-24 months) were presented with a toy search task involving inertial disorientation in 1 of 2 conditions. In the identical condition, 4 identical hiding boxes in a rectangular formation were set within a circular enclosure. In the distinctive condition, 4 distinctive hiding boxes were used. Infants searched the goal box and its rotational equivalent significantly more than would be expected by chance in the identical condition, showing that they were sensitive to the geometric configuration of the array of boxes. Unlike the results of studies using a rectangular enclosure, however, in the distinctive condition, infants searched at the correct location significantly more than at other locations.

Visual Cognition, 2007

In a series of experiments we tested 4-and 8-month-olds' ability to represent the spatial layout of an object across changes in its orientation with respect to egocentric spatial coordinates. A fixed-trial familiarisation procedure based on visual habituation behaviour shows that both age-groups are able to discriminate between different object-centred spatial configurations.

Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie, 1982

The speed with which spatial information is classified into categories was tested by asking 129 subjects from four age groups-34 six-year-olds, 35 ten-year-olds, 30 fourteen-year-olds, and 30 adult university students-to sort six decks of cards, each requiring a spatial judgment. The results indicated that: (1) oblique discriminations required more processing time than did vertical-horizontal discriminations; (2) stimuli along the vertical axis were not processed significantly more quickly than stimuli along the horizontal axis; and (3) position variations slowed orientation discriminations, especially if the lines were of oblique orientation. The effect of position variations was particularly marked for the 6-year-olds. The role of positional cues in spatial organization, as well as aspects of developmental changes in spatial concepts and strategies, are discussed. RESUME Evaluation de la vitesse de categorisation de I'information spatiale chez 129 Ss de quatre groupes d'age-34 Ss de 6 ans, 35 Ss de 10 ans, 30 Ss de 14 ans et 30 Ss adultes de niveau universitaire-qui avaient a classifier six ensembles de cartes requerant chacun un jugement spatial. Les resultats montrent que (1) la discrimination des obliques exige un temps de traitement plus long que celle des verticales et des horizontales; (2) les stimulis disposes selon un axe vertical ne sont pas traites plus rapidement que ceux qui sont disposes selon un axe vertical; (3) les variations de position ralentissent les discriminations d'orientation, plus specialement dans le cas ou les lignes sont orientees obliquement. L'effet des variations de position a ete particulierement marque chez les enfants de 6 ans. La discussion porte sur le role des indices de position dans I'organisation spatiale de meme que sur certains aspects des changements lies au developpement dans les concepts et les strategies relatifs a I'espace. Spatial displays are often analyzed by means of the perceptual features and dimensions that underly them (Gibson, 1969). Thus, how space is organized and processed may be understood in the context of spatial features such as position (i.e., up, down, right, left) and orientation (i.e., vertical, horizontal, oblique). Reports by Appelle (1972), Ibbotson and Bryant (1976), Laurendeau and Pinard (1970), and others have documented the finding that vertical orientation serves as a prime dimension for guiding perception, and that within this dimension, "up" serves as the unmarked (positive) pole

Infant Behavior and Development, 2006

An appreciation of object-centred spatial relations involves representing a 'within-object' spatial relation across changes in the object orientation. This representational ability is important in adult object recognition . Recognition-bycomponents: A theory of human image understanding. Psychological Review, 94, 115-147;. Representation and recognition of the spatial organisation of three-dimensional structure.

Cognitive Psychology, 2013

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.

Spatial memory is the metaphorical hook on which our everyday experiences hang. One way of thinking about the development of spatial memory is as a progression from (a) egocentric (self-based) codings to (b) simple allocentric (world-based) codings relative to just one spatial reference to (c) codings using multiple allocentric spatial references together. We re-examined that timeline in a simplified virtual environment. Children aged 3-5 years saw a virtual penguin in relation to symmetric landmarks and then recalled its location after being ‘teleported’ to a new viewpoint. We found that children aged 3.5-4.0 years successfully used a single-landmark recall strategy, which is even younger than our previous work with a more cue-rich environment (Negen, Heywood-Everett, Roome & Nardini, 2017). Children succeeded at multiple-landmark allocentric recall at age 4.0-4.5 years, which is also younger than our previous findings in a more cue-rich environment. In addition, an inhibition measure was found to be a significant predictor of single-landmark strategies and recall accuracy. These findings suggest that single- and multi-landmark allocentric recall emerge earlier than previously thought, and that executive functions may form a bottleneck in environments that are not purposefully simplified to have fewer cues than naturalistic environments.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2010

Navigation in a complex environment can rely on the use of different spatial strategies. We have focused on the employment of ''allocentric" (i.e., encoding interrelationships among environmental cues, movements, and the location of the goal) and ''sequential egocentric" (i.e., sequences of body turns associated with specific choice points) strategies during navigation. To investigate the developmental pattern of these two strategies in school-aged children, we used a virtual reality paradigm in which the spontaneous or imposed use of both strategies could be assessed. Our results showed an increase in spontaneous use of the allocentric strategy and also an increase in reliance on environmental landmarks with age. Although a majority of the children spontaneously used the sequential egocentric strategy, all age groups performed above chance when the allocentric strategy was imposed. Altogether, our findings suggest that young children are able to employ an allocentric strategy but that the nature of this allocentric strategy changes progressively in a complex cognitive representation between 5 and 10 years of age.