DO CHILDREN REPRESENT VIRTUAL SPATIAL-TEMPORAL QUALITIES DIFFERENT THAN ADULTS?

Decades-old research has demonstrated the effects of virtual space on perception mostly with adult samples. Little is known about children’s ability to utilize spatial-temporal qualities from computerized settings. Past research with primary school children suggested that the ability to utilize spatial-temporal information is crucial for inferring cause-effect relationships of natural phenomena. However, children’s performance lagged behind when spatial-temporal qualities were presented on a computer screen. To investigate this matter further, 16 adults, 17 nursery, and 19 reception age children were tested individually (N=52) across three tasks –virtual, virtual with less intense, and actual spatial-temporal tasks-. The results showed that: (1) young children performed poorly on virtual tasks. (2) Children’s ability to process spatial-temporal information varied largely depending on the characteristics of the task. (3) Spatial-temporal analysis in a virtual space required extra support from widely distributed domains operating attention and memory. (4) The intensity of the information presentation at virtual displays influenced young children’s performances, but not adults’. The results may explain why some children cannot perform well / benefit from teaching/learning activities via 2/3-dimensional settings: the ability to utilize the amount of spatial-temporal information varies widely across development, in particular when children cannot manipulate the intensity of the information they are exposed to. Missing the third dimension (e.g. depth) in virtual tasks is challenging for both young and older children in which the majority of them seem to fail to compensate. Evolutionarily our coping systems seem to be more advanced for extracting spatial-temporal information from real environments as opposed to virtual. This may challenge in particular the research measuring young children’s performances from computerized displays.