Learning in Real-Life and Virtual Navigation Games in Mbendjele BaYaka Children

Human navigation is an ability central to many activities. A prevalent hypothesis for different navigation strategies is the cognitive maps hypothesis, which is a complex navigation strategy that relies on survey knowledge of the environment and involves the formation of mental representations, allowing navigators to efficiently and flexibly navigate through different strategies to reach any target location. Learning plays a crucial role in the development of navigation abilities, with individual differences observed. This thesis aims to explore the relationship between learning and navigation performance in real-life and virtual environments among Mbendjele BaYaka children, a hunter-gatherer community from the Congo Basin that relies on daily navigation for collecting food and has little experience with technology. I will focus on travel speed, contributing to our understanding of the suitability of virtual reality (VR) for spatial navigation research. The virtual navigation...Show moreHuman navigation is an ability central to many activities. A prevalent hypothesis for different navigation strategies is the cognitive maps hypothesis, which is a complex navigation strategy that relies on survey knowledge of the environment and involves the formation of mental representations, allowing navigators to efficiently and flexibly navigate through different strategies to reach any target location. Learning plays a crucial role in the development of navigation abilities, with individual differences observed. This thesis aims to explore the relationship between learning and navigation performance in real-life and virtual environments among Mbendjele BaYaka children, a hunter-gatherer community from the Congo Basin that relies on daily navigation for collecting food and has little experience with technology. I will focus on travel speed, contributing to our understanding of the suitability of virtual reality (VR) for spatial navigation research. The virtual navigation experiment involved children playing a computer game to find and collect food items in a three-dimensional virtual environment. The real-life navigation experiment included partially the same children participating in a real-life honey-finding game. Both experiments have been set up to investigate different spatial skills and their impact on navigation performance among children ranging in age from 4 to 16. My research took advantage of the fact that certain navigation tasks in this experiment were identical, namely repeated returns to the same location. The research investigates the travel speed of children, using linear mixed models to analyse the effect of trial number on spatial learning while controlling for age and comparing their spatial performances in real and virtual environments. The results showed that trial number and session had different effects in each setting, and there was no correlation between real-life and virtual navigation performance. This shows that more research is needed to improve study design, to make environments more similar, and to make reward moments more congruent.Show less

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Learning in Real-Life and Virtual Navigation Games in Mbendjele BaYaka Children