42 research outputs found
The development of path integration: combining estimations of distance and heading
Efficient daily navigation is underpinned by path integration, the mechanism by which we use self-movement information to update our position in space. This process is well-understood in adulthood, but there has been relatively little study of path integration in childhood, leading to an underrepresentation in accounts of navigational development. Previous research has shown that calculation of distance and heading both tend to be less accurate in children as they are in adults, although there have been no studies of the combined calculation of distance and heading that typifies naturalistic path integration. In the present study 5-year-olds and 7-year-olds took part in a triangle-completion task, where they were required to return to the startpoint of a multi-element path using only idiothetic information. Performance was compared to a sample of adult participants, who were found to be more accurate than children on measures of landing error, heading error, and distance error. 7-year-olds were significantly more accurate than 5-year-olds on measures of landing error and heading error, although the difference between groups was much smaller for distance error. All measures were reliably correlated with age, demonstrating a clear development of path integration abilities within the age range tested. Taken together, these data make a strong case for the inclusion of path integration within developmental models of spatial navigational processing
Size and shape constancy in consumer virtual reality
With the increase in popularity of consumer virtual reality headsets, for research and other applications, it is important to understand the accuracy of 3D perception in VR. We investigated the perceptual accuracy of near-field virtual distances using a size and shape constancy task, in two commercially available devices. Participants wore either the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift and adjusted the size of a virtual stimulus to match the geometric qualities (size and depth) of a physical stimulus they were able to refer to haptically. The judgments participants made allowed for an indirect measure of their perception of the egocentric, virtual distance to the stimuli. The data show under-constancy and are consistent with research from carefully calibrated psychophysical techniques. There was no difference in the degree of constancy found in the two headsets. We conclude that consumer virtual reality headsets provide a sufficiently high degree of accuracy in distance perception, to allow them to be used confidently in future experimental vision science, and other research applications in psychology
The process of spatial knowledge acquisition in a square and a circular virtual environment
This study investigated the effect of the environmental structure (circular vs.
square environment) on spatial knowledge acquisition in a desktop virtual
situation in which self-determined movement was allowed with a total of 120
participants: 7-, 8-year-old children; 11, 12-year-old children, and adults. In
all measurements of spatial knowledge acquisition an overall developmental
performance increase from younger children to adults was found. In contrast to
that, the exploration and learning behavior did not differ between adults and
children. Furthermore, the environmental structure influencedthenumber of trials
needed to learn the two routes used and the distance walked to the determined
landmarks. All these tasks were easier in a circular than in a square
environment. This influenceofthe environmental structure was absent in the
direction estimations task. The advantage of spatial knowledge acquisition in a
circular environment in three of four tasks is discussed
Developing attentional control in naturalistic dynamic road crossing situations
In the last 20 years, there has been increasing interest in studying visual attentional processes under
more natural conditions. In the present study, we propose to determine the critical age at which
children show similar to adult performance and attentional control in a visually guided task; in a
naturalistic dynamic and socially relevant context: road crossing. We monitored visual exploration
and crossing decisions in adults and children aged between 5 and 15 while they watched road trafc
videos containing a range of trafc densities with or without pedestrians. 5–10 year old (y/o) children
showed less systematic gaze patterns. More specifcally, adults and 11–15y/o children look mainly at
the vehicles’ appearing point, which is an optimal location to sample diagnostic information for the
task. In contrast, 5–10y/os look more at socially relevant stimuli and attend to moving vehicles further
down the trajectory when the trafc density is high. Critically, 5-10y/o children also make an increased
number of crossing decisions compared to 11–15y/os and adults. Our fndings reveal a critical shift
around 10y/o in attentional control and crossing decisions in a road crossing task
Imagining what might be : why children underestimate uncertainty
Children’s well-documented tendency to behave as if they know more than they do about uncertain events is reduced under two conditions: when the outcome of a chance event has yet to be determined and when one unknown outcome has occurred but is difficult to imagine. In Experiment 1, in line with published findings, 5- and 6-year-olds (N = 61) preferred to guess the unknown location of a known object when the object was in place rather than before its location had been determined. There was no such preference when the object’s identity was unknown. In Experiment 2, 29 5- and 6-year-olds were more likely to correctly mark both possible locations when an already hidden object’s identity was unknown rather than known. We conclude that children’s vivid imaginations can lead them to underestimate uncertainty in a similar way to imagination inflation or fluency effects in adults