Virtual Reality as a Potential Tool for Assessing Spatial Skills in Young Children

• In Event: 1-054 - Emerging Perspectives on Cognitive and Social Development in Virtual Spaces

Integrative Statement

Virtual Reality as a Potential Tool for Assessing Spatial Skills in Young Children

Preschool Educators have recently identified a pressing need for better tools to test spatial skills and better interventions to help improve them (Gehris, Gooze, & Whitaker, 2015). As consumer virtual reality becomes less expensive, can it help fill this gap? We have now completed a total of four studies of spatial cognition using virtual reality. From this base of experience, we answer three essential questions: (1) Does VR offer anything novel in terms of how spatial skills can be assessed? (2) Do children perform in comparable ways in virtual versus real environments, showing that they tolerate the VR well? (3) Do measurements in VR spatial tasks relate to other interesting individual differences in cognitive development?

For the first point, the traditional way to look for allocentric (world-based) reasoning in young children is to present a target, disorient them, and then release them to find the target. We have developed a new ‘teleportation’ technique. In this paradigm, children see a target, the screen fades to black, the virtual ‘camera’ moves, and the screen fades up. The child then points to where they best remember the target. This manipulation forces recall from a new viewpoint but also does not allow the participant any self-motion information, requiring allocentric reasoning. It further does not allow them to experience other uncontrolled viewpoints during the response and has the practical advantage of being much faster on each trial. This shows that VR can and does provide unique tools for assessing spatial skills.

For the second point, performance is at least comparable in our VR tasks and similar non-VR tasks. In our most recent virtual study, children were shown a target near one of two landmarks. After teleporting, children at 3.5-4.0 years were able to point nearer the correct landmark on 74% of trials, p = .008. Compare with another modern study (Nardini, Thomas, Knowland, Braddick, & Atkinson, 2009), where children failed a conceptually-similar non-VR task even at 5 years old. In line with current theory regarding virtual sickness, we also did not encounter issues with discomfort or nausea. This shows that the teleporting procedure is not too confusing, not upsetting, and can provide comparable or superior performance to more traditional methods. Improved performance in particular might be helpful in avoiding overall floor effects during assessment at young ages.

For the third point, we also measured executive function (Day-Night Task) and vocabulary (British Picture Vocabulary Scale) in the last study. Here we found significant correlations between performance in the spatial task and both of these, r = .40 and .42 respectively, p < .001 for both. Further, these variables predicted spatial scores over and above the age effect, ΔR2 = .12, F(3,60) = 3.49, p = .021. This suggests that individual differences measured in spatial VR tasks are indeed related to other outcomes of interest to Educators.

On the whole, our experience and results with VR suggest a bright potential to use it in assessment and intervention for spatial skills for young children.

Authors

• James Negen, University of Durham
  Presenting Author

• Linda Bou-Ali, American University of Beirut
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marko Nardini, University of Durham
  Non-Presenting Author