Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

Psychology

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Jennifer Yang

Committee Member

Laura Lakusta

Committee Member

Ana DiGiovanni

Abstract

The present study examined direction giving accuracy and spatial language use in children across Real Life (RL) and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. Fifty children completed a direction giving task in which they watched pre-recorded videos of a campus route in both a real life and a virtual reality environment, verbally describing the route to a blind stuffed animal. Direction giving accuracy was operationalized as the proportion of correctly identified choice points in each environment. Results indicated that children demonstrated significantly higher accuracy in the RL environment than in the VR environment, though accuracy across environments was strongly positively correlated. Age was the only individual characteristic significantly associated with direction giving accuracy in both environments. Pearson correlations revealed that total directional word use was strongly positively correlated with overall direction giving accuracy, while landmark frequency was negatively correlated with accuracy. A follow up analysis indicated that direction only terms were more strongly associated with accuracy than landmark based directional terms. These findings highlight the importance of directional language precision in children’s navigational communication and further suggest that virtual environments may serve as ecologically valid contexts for studying spatial language development.

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