How do children learn to navigate their world?
Children as young as five may have the brain system to support map-based navigation
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Wayfinding helps children move confidently and safely through their environments. It’s the process of figuring out where they are, where they’re going, and how to get there. My 3-year-old daughter proudly navigates from home to preschool and back again, a short walk we’ve been taking with her for over a year.
Behind this seemingly simple act lies a remarkable set of cognitive skills that will continue to evolve for the next decade of her life. It’s not until early adolescence that children reach adult-level navigational abilities. But when and how do these abilities first emerge?
“We have a dedicated neural system for map-based navigation, but where does it come from?” asks Daniel D. Dilks, Associate Professor of Psychology at Emory University. “Are we born with it, or does it take a whole lot of life experience?” Dilks researches the visual cortex — an area of the brain that processes visual information — and its development from early childhood to adulthood. The retrosplenial complex (RSC) is a part of the medial parietal lobe that responds specifically to scenes, such as landscapes, cityscapes, and rooms, rather than faces or objects. This region is crucial for spatial navigation using landmarks.
“We have a dedicated neural system for map-based navigation.”
Daniel D. Dilks
In a recent study, Dilks and Yaelan Jung, a postdoctoral fellow in Emory’s Department of Psychology, created Tiny Town, a virtual environment with six structures: two ice cream stores, two playgrounds, and two fire stations. The center of Tiny Town featured a triangle that separated three landscapes: the mountain corner, the tree corner, and the lake corner. Sixteen 5-year-olds were taught to navigate Tiny Town.
Then, in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, the children were shown structures from Tiny Town and asked whether those structures were in the mountain, tree, or lake corner. The researchers saw brain activity in the RSC that corresponded to the locations of the structures in Tiny Town. The ice cream store by the mountain and the ice cream store by the lake, for instance, were represented differently by the RSC. Also, the RSC was activated more strongly in children who did better on the task, which suggests that having stronger activation helped children reach the correct answer.
“Children as young as 5 can use landmarks to navigate around a map.”
This study, while small and in need of replication, provides the first evidence that children as young as 5 can use landmarks to navigate around a map. “Before our paper, map-based navigation was thought to be a very sophisticated behavior and probably not developed in children for a decade or more,” Dilks says.
Dilks believes the RSC may develop even before children are able to walk, when they are carried from room to room or pushed in a stroller around the neighborhood. To find out, his team plans next to study toddlers in the scanner.
Wayfinding activities offer a practical way for educators, caregivers, and parents to nurture children’s spatial thinking, a foundational skill for success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Adults could try engaging children with simple maps of familiar environments like their home, a playground, or a local park. They could also strengthen spatial awareness by encouraging children to explore the outdoors, where they can follow trails and spot landmarks.
“Map-based navigation is inherently spatial, so let’s leverage that,” says Dilks. “Spatial thinking is linked to both skill and interest in STEM fields, as well as art, and everyone has the potential to improve with practice.”
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