The spontaneous use of navigation strategies in children 5, 7 and 10 years of age (THESIS VERSION)

Abstract

Two essential navigation strategies can be separated; the sequential egocentric (i.e. route-based) strategy in which a sequence of body turns is remembered and the allocentric (i.e. map-based) strategy in which environmental landmarks are used for orientation. It has been suggested that both strategies are supported by the hippocampus, a brain region that is involved in the rapid encoding of information, and therefore should appear early in training. In the present study the parallel involvement of the sequential egocentric and allocentric navigation strategies in the learning process was examined in children 5, 7 and 10 years of age. With the use of a virtual reality task in which the different strategies could be dissociated it was shown that all age groups had encoded egocentric (body turn) and allocentric (landmark) information in parallel, already early in training. Though the 5- year-olds did show a preference for the egocentric strategy, they performed above chance level when required to use an allocentric strategy.