Are children systematic explorers or do they learn about the environment around them through randomly stumbling upon important landmarks and objects? Do adults follow rational exploration and navigation strategies at all? Are people of any ages capable of efficiently planning their spatial navigation multiple steps ahead - and if they are, how might this ability differ between people who regularly engage in different types of physical activities, like sports? To address such questions experimentally, our group employs a variety of methods ranging from classic online or 2D tablet games and 3D Augmented Reality (AR) tablet games, to tasks that take place in Virtual Reality (VR). By collecting rich multidimensional data about children's and adults' movements in space as well as decisions in information-search tasks, we aim to characterise their spatial exploratory behaviour as a function of their age, cognitive abilities (e.g., executive functioning or working memory), and the environment's structure, among other factors. This approach enables us to uncover new knowledge about the cognitive mechanisms of truly active learning in space, unfolding through the movement of a learner who dynamically interacts with their environment.

As an example, our recent study (Ruggeri, Stanciu, & Völter, 2024) investigated how the efficiency of planning ahead in sequential information-search in spatial tasks may differ depending on the long-term physical experiences and resulting skill set of an individual. In particular, we compared the performances of experienced climbers with non-climbers in three games that measured planning ahead in different ways: first, in a Maze-entry-selection task, players had to find as quickly as  possible which entry point led to the treasure in the middle of a concentrically arranged maze (see the illustration below, left). Then, in a Maze-search task, participants were asked to choose which three tiles - occluding potential passageways between the levels of a maze - they wanted to remove to reveal what was hiding behind, so that they could find the path to the treasure (see the illustration below, right). Finally, we also tested if climbers and non-climbers would show any differences in being able to ask informative questions, with a version of the 20-Questions game (see also Ruggeri, Sim, & Xu, 2017).

We hypothesised that adults with climbing experience would perform better than non-climbers in spatial-navigation or verbal question-asking tasks that require planning, due to their extensive training in visualising and mentally simulating sequences of moves required to complete (climbing) routes. This prediction was partly confirmed: the results of our study suggest that climbers had some advantage over non-climbers when solving the maze-navigation tasks. Climbers were faster at finding the correct entry point to a maze that would lead to the treasure hidden inside, and they were faster at deciding which tile to remove to gather information about the structure of the maze. However, there was no difference between the overall accuracy and efficiency of the two groups, or in the questions that people chose in the 20-Questions game. This suggests that the planning abilities trained during climbing can be harnessed also in different contexts, at least within the spatial domain - that is, people can benefit from the effects of sports on planning spatial navigation in certain new tasks that are similar in structure to the given sport type.

Selected publication(s):

• Ruggeri, A., Stanciu, O., & Völter, C. (2024). Selective advantage of climbers in spatial navigation tasks. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 22(2), 428-445.