The development of navigation and attentional abilities shapes how children explore naturalistic environments

Abstract

Exploration is fundamental to how children learn about the world. To explore a new environment comprehensively, a child must navigate without getting lost while simultaneously attending to salient information along the way. Both abilities improve across childhood, yet most studies examine them in isolation, often in constrained spaces with limited sensory complexity. Here, we asked 7- to 14-year-old children (N=42) and young adults (18-22; N=42) to freely explore a large furniture store in immersive virtual reality, which contained many objects and attention-capturing multisensory events. Surprisingly, despite traveling comparable distances, children explored less - they covered less spatial area and examined fewer unique objects than adults. Fine-grained analyses of their behaviors showed that the reduction in exploration was due to children spending more time backtracking and children taking longer to adapt to salient multisensory objects, which were uncorrelated across individuals after controlling for age and independently predicted exploration. However, only backtracking duration predicted success in a subsequent search task, demonstrating a link between navigational success during exploration and the quality of learned spatial representations for later use. Together, the results demonstrate that children explore less comprehensively than adults in large-scale spaces because they are susceptible to getting lost and perseverating on salient events nested within a large environment, but that these behaviors change with age. This suggests that while children are widely considered to be curious explorers within local environments, their ability to do so within larger environments is shaped by the maturation of cognitive systems that integrate experiences over complex contexts.