Impacts of Physical Living Environment on Spatial Learning

The physical environment we inhabit is believed to influence our spatial learning, which involves acquiring and using information about the spatial relationship between objects or landmarks in an environment for navigation. However, the timing and way in which the environment affects spatial learning remain unclear. To address this issue, we recruited school-aged children from both rural and urban areas and studied the developmental patterns of their spatial perception and navigation abilities. We assessed spatial perception ability using the Water-level task, which required participants to judge the water-level orientation of a tilted bottle. Navigation ability was assessed using accuracy and efficiency to locate a target in a radial-arm maze. Our results showed that rural children aged 5-7 exhibited superior spatial perception and egocentric navigation ability compared to their urban counterparts. Meanwhile, rural children aged 8-12 showed stronger allocentric wayfinding abilities than their urban counterparts. Additionally, we found a tight association between spatial perception and navigation performance only in urban children, but not in rural children. Taken together, our findings reveal that rural environments foster the development of egocentric representation ability in early childhood and allocentric representation ability in middle childhood. The contrast in perception-navigation association patterns between rural and urban children suggests that they may have different spatial learning processes.This research suggests that the physical characteristics of the living environment play significant roles in shaping children’s spatial learning processes. Urban planners may consider designing environments that promote diverse spatial learning strategies, taking into account the importance of both egocentric and allocentric representation abilities.