Although spatial navigation competence improves greatly from birth to adulthood, different spatial memory capacities emerge at different ages. Here, we characterized the capacity of 5-9-year-old children to use path integration to build egocentric and allocentric spatial representations to navigate in their environment, and compared their performance with that of young adults. First, blindfolded participants were tested on their ability to return to a starting point after being led on straight and two-legged paths. This egocentric homing task comprising angular and linear displacements allowed us to evaluate path integration capacities in absence of external landmarks. Second, we evaluated whether participants could use path integration, in absence of visual information, to create an allocentric spatial representation to navigate along novel paths between objects, and thus demonstrate the ability to build a cognitive map of their environment. Ninety percent of the 5-9-year-old children could use path integration to create an egocentric representation of their journey to return to a starting point, but they were overall less precise than adults. Sixty-four percent of 5-9-year-old children were capable of using path integration to build a cognitive map enabling them to take shortcuts, and task performance was not dependent on age. Imprecisions in novel paths made by the children who built a cognitive map could be explained by poorer integration of the experienced turns during the learning phase, as well as greater individual variability. In sum, these findings demonstrate that 5-9-year-old children can use path integration to build a cognitive map in absence of visual information.

中文翻译：

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五到九岁的孩子可以使用路径整合来构建没有视觉的认知地图

虽然空间导航能力从出生到成年有很大提高，但不同年龄出现不同的空间记忆能力。在这里，我们描述了 5-9 岁儿童使用路径整合建立以自我为中心和以异己为中心的空间表征以在他们的环境中导航的能力，并将他们的表现与年轻人的表现进行了比较。首先，被蒙住眼睛的参与者在被引导到直线和两条腿的路径上后，测试他们返回起点的能力。这种以自我为中心的归位任务包括角位移和线性位移，使我们能够在没有外部地标的情况下评估路径整合能力。其次，我们评估了参与者是否可以在没有视觉信息的情况下使用路径整合，创建一个以异中心为中心的空间表示，以沿着对象之间的新路径导航，从而展示构建其环境认知地图的能力。90% 的 5-9 岁儿童可以使用路径整合来创建以自我为中心的返回起点的旅程表示，但他们总体上不如成人精确。64% 的 5-9 岁儿童能够使用路径整合来构建认知地图，使他们能够走捷径，并且任务表现与年龄无关。构建认知地图的儿童在新路径中的不精确性可以通过学习阶段中所经历轮次的较差整合以及更大的个体可变性来解释。总共，