Active navigation enhances children's spatial but not episodic memory

This paper uses a Yoked experimental design to investigate the selective advantage of active spatial navigation in 4- to 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with a map game in which they were asked to find the shortest way for a monster to get across town while collecting its five monster friends on the way. Active control was associated with better recall for path length and the area between paths, whereas no differences were observed for the number of corners. Further, active navigation did not enhance episodic memory. Our results indicate that the benefits of active control during navigation are selective, supporting the encoding of global route characteristics, while leaving other detailed or incidental aspects unaffected.