Using virtual reality to assess dynamic self-motion and landmark cues for spatial updating in children and adults

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.