Measuring spatial navigation during locomotion in children: A systematic review

Spatial navigation allows us to move around our environment, walking being the most advanced form of human locomotion. Over the years, a range of tools has been developed to study spatial navigation in children. Aim. To describe the role of locomotion during the assessment of spatial navigation in children, providing an overview of the instruments available for assessing spatial navigation in typically developing children and those with neurodevelopmental disorders. Methods and Procedures. A systematic search was performed in six electronic databases between December 2022 and February 2023, then updated in July 2023. Cross-sectional and observational studies were included. Outcomes and results. Of the 3,385 studies screened, 47 were selected for this review. Five studies described the influence of locomotion on spatial navigation, and seven studies included locomotion as an explanatory variable in this area. Most studies focused on children from five to twelve years old, whereas only nine were centred on infants and preschoolers. Just eight assessed spatial abilities in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. Conclusions and implications. Children with or at risk of neurodevelopmental impairments show poorer spatial navigation skills. Having the choice to actively explore the space is more important than the way they locomote. It is necessary to have tools to assess spatial navigation during locomotion early in infancy.

Context memory formed in medial prefrontal cortex during infancy enhances learning in adulthood

Adult behavior is commonly thought to be shaped by early-life experience, although episodes experienced during infancy appear to be forgotten. Exposing male rats during infancy to discrete spatial experience we show that these rats in adulthood are significantly better at forming a spatial memory than control rats without such infantile experience. We moreover show that the adult rats' improved spatial memory capability is mainly based on memory for context information during the infantile experiences. Infantile spatial experience increased c-Fos activity at memory testing during adulthood in the prelimbic medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but not in the hippocampus. Inhibiting prelimbic mPFC at testing during adulthood abolished the enhancing effect of infantile spatial experience on learning. Adult spatial memory capability only benefitted from spatial experience occurring during the sensitive period of infancy, but not when occurring later during childhood, and when sleep followed the infantile experience. In conclusion, the infantile brain, by a sleep-dependent mechanism, favors consolidation of memory for the context in which episodes are experienced. These representations comprise mPFC regions and context-dependently facilitate learning in adulthood.

Consistency of spatial ability performance in children, adolescents, and young adults

Background

Spatial abilities are essential cognitive skills for many aspects of our everyday life that develop substantially throughout childhood and adolescence. While there are numerous measurement tools to evaluate these abilities, many of them have been designed for specific age groups hampering comparability throughout development. Thus, we determined test-retest-reliability and minimal detectable change for a set of tests that evaluate spatial ability performance in their variety in youth and compared them to young adults.

Methods

Children (age: 11.4 ± 0.5 years, n = 26), adolescents (age: 12.5 ± 0.7 years, n = 22), and young adults (age: 26.1 ± 4.0 years, n = 26) performed a set of five spatial ability tests twice, 20 min apart: Paper Folding Test (PFT), Mental Rotation Test (MRT), Water Level Task (WLT), Corsi Block Test (CBT), and Numbered Cones Run (NCR). Relative and absolute test-retest reliability was determined by calculating the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC3,1) and the standard error of measurement (SEM), respectively. Further, the minimal detectable change (MDC95%) was calculated to identify clinically relevant changes between repeated measurements.

Results

Irrespective of test, reliability was "excellent" (i.e., ICC3,1 ≥ 0.75) in all age cohorts and the SEM values were rather small. The MDC95% values needed to identify relevant changes in repeated measurements of spatial ability performance ranged between 0.8 and 13.9% in children, 1.1 and 24.5% in adolescents, and 0.7 and 20.8% in young adults.

Conclusion

The determined values indicate that the investigated set of tests is reliable to detect spatial ability performance in healthy children, adolescents, and young adults.

Scene construction and autobiographical memory retrieval in autism spectrum disorder

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently exhibit difficulties in retrieving autobiographical memories (AMs) of specific events from their life. Such memory deficits are frequently attributed to underlying disruptions in self-referential or social cognition processes. This makes intuitive sense as these are hallmarks of ASD. However, an emerging literature suggests that parallel deficits also exist in ASD individuals' ability to reconstruct the rich spatial contexts in which events occur. This is a capacity known as scene construction, and in typically developing individuals is considered a core process in retrieving AMs. In this review, we discuss evidence of difficulties with scene construction in ASD, drawing upon experiments that involve AM retrieval, other forms of mental time travel, and spatial navigation. We also highlight aspects of extant data that cannot be accounted for using purely social explanations of memory deficits in ASD. We conclude by identifying key questions raised by our framework and suggest how they might be addressed in future research.

The effect of negative emotion processing on spatial navigation: an experimental study using virtual reality

Finding one's way in unfamiliar environments is an essential ability. When navigating, people are overwhelmed with an enormous amount of information. However, some information might be more relevant than others. Despite the mounting knowledge about the mechanisms underlying orientational skills, and the notable effects of facial emotions on human behavior, little is known about emotions' effects on spatial navigation. Hereby, this study aimed to explore how exposure to others' negative emotional facial expressions affects wayfinding performances. Moreover, gender differences that characterize both processes were considered. Fifty-five participants (31 females) entered twice in three realistic virtual reality environments: the first time, to encode a route to find an object and then to recall the learned path to reach the same object again. In between the two explorations of the virtual environment, participants were asked to undergo a gender categorization task during which they were exposed to sixty faces showing either neutral, fearful, or angry expressions. Results showed a significant interaction between emotions, time, and gender. In particular, the exposition to fearful faces, but not angry and neutral ones, decreased males' wayfinding performances (i.e., travel times and distance travelled), while females' performances were unaffected. Possible explanations for such gender and emotional dissimilarities are discussed.

The development of human cortical scene processing

Decades of research have uncovered the neural basis of place (or "scene") processing in adulthood, revealing a set of three regions that respond selectively to visual scene information, each hypothesized to support distinct functions within scene processing (e.g., recognizing a particular kind of place versus navigating through it). Despite this considerable progress, surprisingly little is known about how these cortical regions develop. Here we review the limited evidence to date, highlighting the first few studies exploring the origins of cortical scene processing in infancy, and the several studies addressing when the scene regions reach full maturity, unfortunately with inconsistent findings. This inconsistency likely stems from common pitfalls in pediatric functional magnetic resonance imaging, and accordingly, we discuss how these pitfalls may be avoided. Furthermore, we point out that almost all studies to date have focused only on general scene selectivity and argue that greater insight could be gleaned by instead exploring the more distinct functions of each region, as well as their connectivity. Finally, with this last point in mind, we offer a novel hypothesis that scene regions supporting navigation (including the occipital place area and retrosplenial complex) mature later than those supporting scene categorization (including the parahippocampal place area).

How Do You Build a Cognitive Map? The Development of Circuits and Computations for the Representation of Space in the Brain

In mammals, the activity of neurons in the entorhinal-hippocampal network is modulated by the animal's position and its movement through space. At multiple stages of this distributed circuit, distinct populations of neurons can represent a rich repertoire of navigation-related variables like the animal's location, the speed and direction of its movements, or the presence of borders and objects. Working together, spatially tuned neurons give rise to an internal representation of space, a cognitive map that supports an animal's ability to navigate the world and to encode and consolidate memories from experience. The mechanisms by which, during development, the brain acquires the ability to create an internal representation of space are just beginning to be elucidated. In this review, we examine recent work that has begun to investigate the ontogeny of circuitry, firing patterns, and computations underpinning the representation of space in the mammalian brain.

Spatial navigation under threat: aversive apprehensions improve route retracing in higher versus lower trait anxious individuals

Spatial navigation is a basic function for survival, and the ability to retrace a route has direct relevance for avoiding dangerous places. This study investigates the effects of aversive apprehensions on spatial navigation in a virtual urban environment. Healthy participants with varying degrees of trait anxiety performed a route-repetition and a route-retracing task under threatening and safe context conditions. Results reveal an interaction between the effect of threatening/safe environments and trait anxiety: while threat impairs route-retracing in lower-anxious individuals, this navigational skill is boosted in higher-anxious individuals. According to attentional control theory, this finding can be explained by an attentional shift toward information relevant for intuitive coping strategies (i.e., running away), which should be more pronounced in higher-anxious individuals. On a broader scale, our results demonstrate an often-neglected advantage of trait anxiety, namely that it promotes the processing of environmental information relevant for coping strategies and thus prepares the organism for adequate flight responses.

What about "space" is important for episodic memory?

Early cognitive neuroscientific research revealed that the hippocampus is crucial for spatial navigation in rodents, and for autobiographical episodic memory in humans. Researchers quickly linked these streams to propose that the human hippocampus supports memory through its role in representing space, and research on the link between spatial cognition and episodic memory in humans has proliferated over the past several decades. Different researchers apply the term "spatial" in a variety of contexts, however, and it remains unclear what aspect of space may be critical to memory. Similarly, "episodic" has been defined and tested in different ways. Naturalistic assessment of spatial memory and episodic memory (i.e., episodic autobiographical memory) is required to unify the scale and biological relevance in comparisons of spatial and mnemonic processing. Limitations regarding the translation of rodent to human research, human ontogeny, and inter-individual variability require greater consideration in the interpretation of this literature. In this review, we outline the aspects of space that are (and are not) commonly linked to episodic memory, and then we discuss these dimensions through the lens of individual differences in naturalistic autobiographical memory. Future studies should carefully consider which aspect(s) of space are being linked to memory within the context of naturalistic human cognition. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory.

Individual Differences and Skill Training in Cognitive Mapping: How and Why People Differ

Spatial ability plays important roles in academic learning and everyday activities. A type of spatial thinking that is of particular significance to people's daily lives is cognitive mapping, that is, the process of acquiring, representing, and using knowledge about spatial environments. However, the skill of cognitive mapping shows large individual differences, and the task of spatial orientation and navigation poses great difficulty for some people. In this article, I look at the motivation and findings in the research into spatial knowledge acquisition from an individual differences perspective. I also discuss major implications of the existence of large individual differences, particularly the possibility of improving cognitive mapping by training and adjusting navigation assistance to the wide variations in spatial aptitudes and preferences among people.

Building a Cognitive Science of Human Variation: Individual Differences in Spatial Navigation

The aim of this issue is to take stock of cognitive science of human variation in the field of spatial navigation, an important domain in which debates have often assumed an invariant human mind. Addressing the challenge of individual differences requires cognitive scientists to change their practices in several ways. First, we need to consider how to design measures and paradigms that have adequate psychometric characteristics. Second, using reliable, efficient, and valid measures, we need to examine how people vary from time to time, both in the short run due to emotions, such as stress or time pressure, and in the longer run, due to training or living in physical environments that require wayfinding skills. Third, we need to study people different from the traditional college participants, including variations in age, gender, education, culture, physical environment, and possible interactions among these variables.

Adaptations of the Walking Corsi Test (WalCT) for 2- and 3-year-old preterm and term-born toddlers: A preliminary study

Introduction

Topographical memory is crucial for navigation and environmental representation. The Walking Corsi Test (WalCT) has been used to evaluate topographical memory in children from 4 years upward. The present study aims to determine whether adapted versions of the WalCT- by simplifying instructions and increasing motivation- can be adopted to test topographical memory in 2- and 3-year-old toddlers born at term and preterm. Assessing this skill in such young children is important in light of recent studies that have shown how spatial cognition underlies the development of skills in other cognitive domains as well. Methods: For this purpose, 47 toddlers (27.39 ± 4.34 months, 38.3% females), 20 born at term and 27 preterm, performed two aimed-designed versions of WalCT.

Results

The results showed better performance of the term groups with increasing age and for both versions. On the other hand, performance was better in 2-year-old term toddlers vs. preterm. When rising motivation, 2-year-old preterm toddlers improve their performance but differences between both groups were still significant. The preterm group showed lower performance related to lower levels of attention.

Discussion

This study provides preliminary data on the suitability of the adapted versions of WalCT in early ages and prematurity conditions.

Studying the Development of Navigation Using Virtual Environments

Research on spatial navigation is essential to understanding how mobile species adapt to their environments. Such research increasingly uses virtual environments (VEs) because, although VE has drawbacks, it allows for standardization of procedures, precision in measuring behaviors, ease in introducing variation, and cross-investigator comparability. Developmental researchers have used a wide range of VE testing methods, including desktop computers, gaming consoles, virtual reality, and phone applications. We survey the paradigms to guide researchers' choices, organizing them by their characteristics using a framework proposed by Girard (2022) in which navigation is reactive or deliberative, and may be tied to sensory input or not. This organization highlights what representations each paradigm indicates. VE tools have enriched our picture of the development of navigation, but much research remains to be done, e.g., determining retest reliability, comparing performance on different paradigms, validating performance against real-world behavior and open sharing. Reliable and valid assessments available on open-science repositories are essential for work on the development of navigation, its neural bases, and its implications for other cognitive domains.

Could an Immersive Virtual Reality Training Improve Navigation Skills in Children with Cerebral Palsy? A Pilot Controlled Study

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) suffer deficits in their motor, sensory, and cognitive abilities, as well as in their visuospatial competences. In the last years, several authors have tried to correlate the visuospatial abilities with the navigational ones. Given their importance in everyday functions, navigation skills have been deeply studied using increasingly cutting-edge techniques such as virtual reality (VR). However, to our knowledge, there are no studies focused on training using immersive VR (IVR) in children with movement disorders. For this reason, we proposed an IVR training to 35 young participants with CP and conceived to improve their navigation skills in a “simil-real” environment while playing on a dynamic platform. A subgroup performed a part of the training which was specifically dedicated to the use of the allocentric strategy (i.e., looking for landmarks) to navigate the virtual environment. We then compared the children’s navigation and spatial skills pre- and post-intervention. All the children improved their visual–spatial abilities; particularly, if the IVR activities specifically trained their ability to look for landmarks and use them to navigate. The results of this work highlight the potential of an IVR training program to increase the navigation abilities of patients with CPs.

The Development of Human Navigation in Middle Childhood: A Narrative Review through Methods, Terminology, and Fundamental Stages

Spatial orientation and navigation are fundamental abilities in daily life that develop gradually during childhood, although their development is still not clear. The main aim of the present narrative review was to trace the development of navigational skills in middle childhood (6 to 12 years old) by means of studies present in the literature. To this aim, this review took into account the terminology, methodologies, different paradigms, and apparatuses used to investigate egocentric self-centered and allocentric world-centered representations, besides the different types of spaces (reaching/small/large; physical/virtual). Furthermore, this review provided a brief description of the development of navigational strategies and competences in toddlers and preschool children (0–5 years). The main result of this review showed how middle childhood is a crucial period for the improvement and development of allocentric strategies, including metric information. In fact, during this developmental window, children learn to handle proximal and distal cues, to transpose paper and virtual information into real environments, up to performing similarly to adults. This narrative review could represent a starting point to better clarify the development of navigation and spatial orientation, finalized to trace a development curve useful to map normal development and to have a term of comparison to assess performance in atypical development.

Development of Landmark Use for Navigation in Children: Effects of Age, Sex, Working Memory and Landmark Type

The use of landmarks for navigation develops throughout childhood. Here, we examined the developmental trajectory of egocentric and allocentric navigation based on landmark information in an on-screen virtual environment in 39 5–6-year-olds, 43 7–8-year-olds, and 41 9–10-year-olds. We assessed both categorical performance, indicating the notion of location changes based on the landmarks, as well as metrical performance relating to the precision of the representation of the environment. We investigated whether age, sex, spatial working memory, verbal working memory, and verbal production of left and right contributed to the development of navigation skills. In egocentric navigation, Categorical performance was already above chance at 5 years of age and was positively related to visuo-spatial working memory and the production of left/right, whereas metrical performance was only related to age. Allocentric navigation started to develop between 5 and 8 years of age and was related to sex, with boys outperforming girls. Both boys and girls seemed to rely more on directional landmark information as compared to positional landmark information. To our knowledge, this study is the first to give insight into the relative contribution of different cognitive abilities to navigation skills in school-aged children.

Effects of spatial boundaries on episodic memory development

Children's spatial mapping starts out particularly sensitive to 3D wall-like boundaries and develops over early childhood to flexibly include other boundary types. This study investigated whether spatial boundaries influence children's episodic memory, as in adults, and whether this effect is modulated by boundary type. Eighty-one Korean children (34 girls, 36-84 months old) re-enacted a sequence of three discrete hiding events within a space containing one of three boundaries: 3D wall, aligned objects, or 2D line. Children's memory of events occurring on one side of the boundary developed earlier than those that crossed the boundary. At first, this interaction only applied to the 3D wall and extended to other boundary types with age, suggesting that children's changing spatial representations influence their episodic memory development.

Three cortical scene systems and their development

Since the discovery of three scene-selective regions in the human brain, a central assumption has been that all three regions directly support navigation. We propose instead that cortical scene processing regions support three distinct computational goals (and one not for navigation at all): (i) The parahippocampal place area supports scene categorization, which involves recognizing the kind of place we are in; (ii) the occipital place area supports visually guided navigation, which involves finding our way through the immediately visible environment, avoiding boundaries and obstacles; and (iii) the retrosplenial complex supports map-based navigation, which involves finding our way from a specific place to some distant, out-of-sight place. We further hypothesize that these systems develop along different timelines, with both navigation systems developing slower than the scene categorization system.

Late Development of Early Visual Perception: No Topology-Priority in Peripheral Vision Until Age 10

Topological property (TP) is a basic geometric attribute of objects, which is preserved over continuous and one-to-one transformations and considered to be processed in early vision. This study investigated the global TP perception of 773 children aged 6-14, as compared to 179 adults. The results revealed that adults and children aged 10 or over show a TP priority trend in both central and peripheral vision, that is, less time is required to discriminate TP differences than non-TP differences. Children aged 6-8 show a TP priority trend for central stimuli, but not in their peripheral vision. The TP priority effect in peripheral vision does not emerge until age ˜10 years, and the development of central and peripheral vision seems to be different.

Spatial thinking, cognitive mapping, and spatial awareness

This article looks at wayfinding and spatial orientation as important everyday spatial thinking skills and discusses why some people have difficulty with the skills and how one can assist people with difficulty in navigation. It first clarifies the characteristics of human spatial cognition and behavior and the tendency of spatial knowledge to be distorted and fragmented in the environment. In particular, it emphasizes the existence of large individual differences in the skill of cognitive mapping, namely the accuracy of metric and configurational understanding of the environment. The article then looks at difficulties associated with the use of maps and description of spatial relations. Given these difficulties, the article discusses the possibilities of assisting people with mobile navigation tools and improving the skill of cognitive mapping by training in spatial orientation. Implications for the development of user-adapted and context-aware navigation assistance and the significance of research from an individual differences perspective are finally discussed.

Effects of Physical Exercise Interventions on Spatial Orientation in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Scoping Review

Background: Regular physical exercise plays an integral part in the psychomotor and psychosocial development of children and adolescents, with complex motor and cognitive processes closely linked. Spatial abilities, one aspect of cognitive functioning start to evolve from earliest childhood and reach adult-like levels by early adolescence. As they have been associated with good spatial orientation, wayfinding, map-reading skills, problem solving or analyzing spatial information, these skills facilitate independence and autonomy while growing up. Despite promising results, only few studies investigate this relation between physical exercise and spatial abilities. To use this benefit and develop purposive physical exercise interventions, it is essential to summarize the current evidence. Objectives: This literature review aims to systematically summarize findings regarding the impact of physical exercise interventions on spatial abilities in healthy children and adolescents and identify knowledge gaps. Methods: A systematic search of the literature according to the PRISMA guidelines was conducted on the databases Pubmed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, SportDiscus, and PsycInfo from their inception date till March 2021. Additionally, Google Scholar and refence lists of relevant publications were searched. A descriptive analysis of results was conducted. Results: The literature search identified a total of N = 1,215 records, 11 of which met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed in this review. A total of 621 participants aged 4 to 15 years participated in the studies. Exercise interventions included sport-specific activities, motor-coordinative exercises, high-intensity functional training or spatial orientation/navigation training. Five studies evaluated training effects on mental rotation performance (i.e., Mental Rotation Test), four studies investigated visuo-spatial working memory function/spatial memory (i.e., Corsi Block Test, Virtual Reality Morris Water Maze) and two studies tested spatial orientation capacity (i.e., Orientation-Running Test). Overall, results show a potential for improvement of spatial abilities through physical exercise interventions. However, keeping the diversity of study designs, populations and outcomes in mind, findings need to be interpreted with care. Conclusions: Despite growing interest on the effects of physical exercise interventions on spatial abilities and promising findings of available studies, evidence to date remains limited. Future research is needed to establish how spatial ability development of healthy children and adolescents can be positively supported.

Identifying animal complex cognition requires natural complexity

The search for human cognitive uniqueness often relied on low ecological tests with subjects experiencing unnatural ontogeny. Recently, neuroscience demonstrated the significance of a rich environment on the development of brain structures and cognitive abilities. This stresses the importance to consider the prior knowledge that subjects bring in any experiment. Second, recent developments in multivariate statistics control precisely for a number of factors and their interactions. Making controls in natural observations equivalent and sometimes superior to captive experimental studies without the drawbacks of the latter methods. Thus, we can now investigate complex cognition by accounting for many different factors, as required when solving tasks in nature. Combining both progresses allows us to move toward an “experience-specific cognition”, recognizing that cognition varies extensively in nature as individuals adapt to the precise challenges they experience in life. Such cognitive specialization makes cross-species comparisons more complex, while potentially identifying human cognitive uniqueness.

Factors Related to the Performance of Elite Young Sailors in a Regatta: Spatial Orientation, Age and Experience

The objective of this study was to examine the role of spatial orientation in the performance of sport sailors. Participants were 30 elite male sailors from classes 420, Laser, Windsurfing RS:X and Windsurfing Techno, grouped into two categories: Monohull (18 sailors) and Windsurfing (12 sailors). Ages ranged between 13 and 18 years old (M = 15.7, SD = 1.05). To assess spatial orientation, the Perspective Taking/Spatial Orientation Test was used, and performance was inferred from the final classification at the regatta. In addition, the influence of experience and age on the performance was analyzed. The results show that in the Monohull group, the performance is determined by the spatial orientation (18% of the explained variance), while in the Windsurfing group, the variables that are related to performance are sailing experience and age (60% of the explained variance). Spatial orientation seems to be the more important variable for performance in the Monohull group, while in classes belonging to the Windsurfing group, this variable does not seem to be decisive for obtaining good results in the regatta.

The influence of yaw rotation on spatial navigation during development

Sensory cues enable navigation through space, as they inform us about movement properties, such as the amount of travelled distance and the heading direction. In this study, we focused on the ability to spatially update one's position when only proprioceptive and vestibular information is available. We aimed to investigate the effect of yaw rotation on path integration across development in the absence of visual feedback. To this end, we utilized the triangle completion task: participants were guided through two legs of a triangle and asked to close the shape by walking along its third imagined leg. To test the influence of yaw rotation across development, we tested children between 6 and 11 years old (y.o.) and adults on their perceptions of angles of different degrees. Our results demonstrated that the amount of turn while executing the angle influences performance at all ages, and in some aspects, also interacted with age. Indeed, whilst adults seemed to adjust their heading towards the end of their walked path, younger children took less advantage of this strategy. The amount of disorientation the path induced also affected participants' full maturational ability to spatially navigate with no visual feedback. Increasing induced disorientation required children to be older to reach adult-level performance. Overall, these results provide novel insights on the maturation of spatial navigation-related processes.

Link Between Topographic Memory and the Combined Presentation of ADHD (ADHD-C): A Pilot Study

Background: Topographic memory is the ability to reach various places by recognizing spatial layouts and getting oriented in familiar environments. It involves several different cognitive abilities, in particular executive functions (EF), such as attention, working memory, and planning. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show impairments in inhibitory control, regulation of attention, planning, and working memory. Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate the topographic memory in children with ADHD-combined subtype (ADHD-C). Method: Fifteen children (8-10 years) with a diagnosis of ADHD-C (DSM-5) (ADHD-C group) were compared to 15 children with typical development (TD group) of the same age. All children performed Raven's colored progressive matrices (CPM) test to obtain a measure related with cognitive functioning. The walking Corsi test (WalCT), a large-scale version of the Corsi block-tapping test, was used to assess topographic memory in experimental environment. Results: A higher impairment was observed in ADHD-C than TD with significant differences in the WalCT, in particular on the topographic short-term memory (TSTM) task, on the topographic learning (TL) task, and on the repetition number (RN) task during the TL task. Perseverative errors were reported in performing the square-sequence in the WalCT. Zero-order correlations showed a positive correlation between TSTM and auditory attention, and memory of design of NEPSY-II and digit span of WISC-IV. No statistically significant differences were found between the ADHD-C group and TD group in the TL task in the WalCT condition. Conclusion: In ADHD-C, initial topographic learning was compromised whereas the long-term retention of learned topographical material seemed to not be impaired. In particular, these impairments seem to be linked with difficulties in sustained attention, in spatial memory for novel visual materials, in a poor working memory, and in perseverative behaviors.

Locomotion and Topographical Working Memory in Children With Myelomeningocele and Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita

Background: In children with myelomeningocele (MMC) and arthrogryposis multiplex congenital (AMC), adequate rehabilitation measures are accessible with the goal of attaining the utmost motor development. However, there is a lack of knowledge as to how children develop navigation utilizing their locomotion abilities. The aim of the present study was to explore topographic working memory in children with MMC and AMC. Methods: For this purpose, we assessed 41 children with MMC and AMC, assigned an ambulation group, and 120 typical developing (TD) children, with mean ages of 11.9, 10.6, and 9.9 years, respectively. All groups performed a topographic working memory test while moving in a walking space and a visuospatial working memory test in a reaching space. Children with MMC and AMC also performed a test to measure their ability to reason on visuospatial material, Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices. Results: The topographic working memory span was shorter in the MMC group than in the TD group. In general, all ambulation groups had a shorter topographic working memory span than the TD group. The visuospatial working memory span was shorter in the non-ambulation group than in the TD group. Scores from the visuospatial reasoning test were lower in the non-ambulation group than in the community ambulation group. Conclusions: Even though a higher cognitive score was found in the community ambulation group than in the non-ambulation group, topographic working memory was affected similarly in both groups. Including children who develop community ambulation in therapy programs containing aspects of navigation may gain even children with low levels of MMC and AMC. These results evidenced the importance of motor development and navigational experience gained through direct exploration of the environment on topographic memory.

Improving cognitive mapping by training for people with a poor sense of direction

The skill of spatial learning and orientation is fundamental in humans and differs widely among individuals. Despite its importance, however, the malleability of this skill through practice has scarcely been studied empirically, in contrast to psychometric spatial ability. Thus, this article examines the possibility of improving the accuracy of configurational understanding of the environment by training. A total of 40 adults with a poor sense of direction participated in the experiment; and were randomly assigned to either a condition in which they received feedback only or a condition in which they additionally practiced allocentric spatial updating. Participants walked one route in each session, once a week for 6 weeks, and conducted spatial tasks designed to assess their knowledge of the route. A total of 20 people with an average sense of direction also participated as a comparison group. Results showed that training in allocentric spatial updating improved the accuracy of direction estimates, although the size of the effect was limited: the improvement was not large enough to equate the performance in the groups with a poor versus average sense of direction. The two groups, however, did not differ in spatial skill in mental rotation or path integration. Feedback was effective for improving accuracy in straight-line distance estimates and sketch maps: repeated trials with feedback led to improved accuracy by the sixth session to a level comparable to the group with an average sense of direction. The results show that flexible translation between viewer-centered and environment-centered representations is difficult and not readily trainable, and provide insights into the nature of individual differences in large-scale environmental cognition.

Children five-to-nine years old can use path integration to build a cognitive map without vision

Although spatial navigation competence improves greatly from birth to adulthood, different spatial memory capacities emerge at different ages. Here, we characterized the capacity of 5-9-year-old children to use path integration to build egocentric and allocentric spatial representations to navigate in their environment, and compared their performance with that of young adults. First, blindfolded participants were tested on their ability to return to a starting point after being led on straight and two-legged paths. This egocentric homing task comprising angular and linear displacements allowed us to evaluate path integration capacities in absence of external landmarks. Second, we evaluated whether participants could use path integration, in absence of visual information, to create an allocentric spatial representation to navigate along novel paths between objects, and thus demonstrate the ability to build a cognitive map of their environment. Ninety percent of the 5-9-year-old children could use path integration to create an egocentric representation of their journey to return to a starting point, but they were overall less precise than adults. Sixty-four percent of 5-9-year-old children were capable of using path integration to build a cognitive map enabling them to take shortcuts, and task performance was not dependent on age. Imprecisions in novel paths made by the children who built a cognitive map could be explained by poorer integration of the experienced turns during the learning phase, as well as greater individual variability. In sum, these findings demonstrate that 5-9-year-old children can use path integration to build a cognitive map in absence of visual information.

Late Development of Navigationally Relevant Motion Processing in the Occipital Place Area

Human adults flawlessly and effortlessly navigate boundaries and obstacles in the immediately visible environment, a process we refer to as "visually guided navigation." Neuroimaging work in adults suggests this ability involves the occipital place area (OPA) [1, 2]-a scene-selective region in the dorsal stream that selectively represents information necessary for visually guided navigation [3-9]. Despite progress in understanding the neural basis of visually guided navigation, however, little is known about how this system develops. Is navigationally relevant information processing present in the first few years of life? Or does this information processing only develop after many years of experience? Although a handful of studies have found selective responses to scenes (relative to objects) in OPA in childhood [10-13], no study has explored how more specific navigationally relevant information processing emerges in this region. Here, we do just that by measuring OPA responses to first-person perspective motion information-a proxy for the visual experience of actually navigating the immediate environment-using fMRI in 5- and 8-year-old children. We found that, although OPA already responded more to scenes than objects by age 5, responses to first-person perspective motion were not yet detectable at this same age and rather only emerged by age 8. This protracted development was specific to first-person perspective motion through scenes, not motion on faces or objects, and was not found in other scene-selective regions (the parahippocampal place area or retrosplenial complex) or a motion-selective region (MT). These findings therefore suggest that navigationally relevant information processing in OPA undergoes prolonged development across childhood.

Sun, age and test location affect spatial orientation in human foragers in rainforests

The ability to know the direction of food sources is important for the foraging success of hunter-gatherers, especially in rainforests where dense vegetation limits visual detection distances. Besides sex and age, prior experience with the environment and the use of environmental cues are known to influence orientation abilities of humans. Among environmental cues, the position of the sun in the sky is important for orientation of diurnal animal species. However, whether or to what extent humans use the sun is largely unknown. Here, we investigated orientation abilities of the Mbendjele BaYaka people in the Republic of Congo, by conducting pointing tests (Nparticipants = 54, age: 6-76 years) in different locations in the rainforest. The Mbendjele were overall highly accurate at pointing to out-of-sight targets (median error: 6°). Pointing accuracy increased with age, but sex did not affect accuracy. Crucially, sun visibility increased pointing accuracy in young participants, especially when they were far from the camp. However, this effect became less apparent in older participants who exhibited high pointing accuracy, also when the sun was not visible. This study extends our understandings of orientation abilities of human foragers and provides the first behavioural evidence for sun compass use in humans.

Cross-Domain Associations Between Motor Ability, Independent Exploration, and Large-Scale Spatial Navigation; Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Williams Syndrome, and Typical Development

In typical infants, the achievement of independent locomotion has a positive impact on the development of both small-scale and large-scale spatial cognition. Here we investigated whether this association between the motor and spatial domain: (1) persists into childhood and (2) is detrimental to the development of spatial cognition in individuals with motor deficits, namely, individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS). Despite evidence of a co-occurring motor impairment in many individuals with ADHD, little is known about the developmental consequences of this impairment. Individuals with WS demonstrate impaired motor and spatial competence, yet the relationship between these two impairments is unknown. Typically developing (TD) children (N = 71), individuals with ADHD (N = 51), and individuals with WS (N = 20) completed a battery of motor tasks, a measure of independent exploration, and a virtual reality spatial navigation task. Retrospective motor milestone data were collected for the ADHD and WS groups. Results demonstrated a relationship between fine motor ability and spatial navigation in the TD group, which could reflect the developmental impact of the ability to manually manipulate objects, on spatial knowledge. In contrast, no relationships between the motor and spatial domains were observed for the ADHD or WS groups. Indeed, while there was evidence of motor impairment in both groups, only the WS group demonstrated an impairment in large-scale spatial navigation. The motor-spatial relationship in the TD, but not the ADHD and WS groups, suggests that aspects of spatial cognition can develop via a developmental pathway which bypasses input from the motor domain.