Spatial navigation is a complex ability that plays a crucial role in daily life throughout the lifespan, allowing individuals to successfully orient themselves in the environment. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in implementing training programmes to promote spatial navigation ability, but an overview was missing. The present systematic review aimed to analyse the current evidence on spatial navigation training in healthy individuals of all ages, considering several aspects such as age of participants, training characteristics and outcome measures characteristics as well as transfer effects and other relevant factors. Based on the PRISMA guidelines, we searched the PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection databases. Out of 2670 articles, 24 studies met the inclusion criteria and were eligible for this review.The 24 studies included showed interest in implementing training to promote navigational ability in individuals of all ages. Moreover, training led to an improvement in navigational ability from childhood to senescence, with children appearing to be particularly responsive to training programmes, followed by adults and then older adults. Current literature has also highlighted an extreme heterogeneity in the methodology used to train navigational ability and to evaluate the efficacy of the training. Finally, the positive effects of the training appeared to be independent from types of environments (real and virtual) and space size (large and small) used to implement the training.In conclusion, the present systematic review could provide a useful overview of the navigational training already carried out, thus facilitating future implementations and applications.

Background/Objectives: Observational learning allows people to acquire new skills by observing the actions of others embedded in their social environment. From childhood, observational learning is a central process in human cognitive development, playing a crucial role in the acquisition of complex skills. Children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit deficits in what are considered prerequisites for observational learning to occur (i.e., attending, imitation, delayed imitation, consequence discrimination). Considering this, the present review examined the literature on the complex and timely question of whether individuals with ASD can learn by observation, while accounting for the social versus non-social nature/content of the tasks. Methods: This work was a narrative review aimed at providing an overview of published studies in which observational learning was analyzed in individuals with ASD. Twenty-two studies met the inclusion criteria and were eligible for this review. Results: The core findings indicate that individuals with ASD may be able to learn by observing others, especially when taught the prerequisites for observational learning. Furthermore, the findings indicate that observation may be an effective way to expand the typically restricted and circumscribed interests of children with ASD and to increase emotion recognition skills. Conclusions: Overall, these findings have significant educational, clinical, social, and economic implications, supporting the use of observational learning strategies for both social and non-social skills to reduce reliance on expensive one-on-one teaching and to address some of the core deficits of ASD.

Background/Objectives: Observational learning enables children to acquire new skills by observing others’ actions. Attention is widely recognized as a key supporting process and consists of multiple components that develop substantially during the early school years. Empirical evidence on the association between specific components of attention and observational learning remains limited. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between the main components of attention and observational learning among early primary school children. Methods: Sixty-eight children, aged 6–8, completed a computerized battery assessing the main components of attention (reaction times, simple and related to a choice; focused attention; short-term span of attention; divided and alternating attention) and an observational learning task where children observed an actor detecting a hidden spatial sequence and then reproduced it across detection phase (DP), exercise phase (EP), and automatization phase (AP). Correlational and regression analyses were conducted, controlling for age and gender. Results: Visual and visual–spatial focused attention emerged as significant predictors of performance during DP and EP, with higher levels of focused attention associated with fewer errors and repetitions. Choice reaction time showed phase-specific associations with error rates during early learning phases, whereas age was primarily related to performance during the AP. Conclusions: Observational learning in early primary school relies on specific components of attention rather than on attention as a unitary construct. Visual and visual–spatial focused attention plays a central role during the acquisition and consolidation of observed sequences, with implications for understanding learning from models and for educational practices based on demonstration.

Different factors have been suggested to explain why humans differ in how well and efficiently they acquire and use spatial knowledge about environments. However, the role of emotional variables has been scarcely investigated. Here, we aimed to explore the role of the emotional dimension in terms of the emotional bonds that individuals develop towards places (i.e., the emotional dimension of place attachment that is place identity) and spatial anxiety in explaining individual differences in different kinds of environmental knowledge. A sample of ninety-nine students at the Magna Graecia University of Catanzaro (UMG) were given self-report questionnaires probing place attachment, spatial anxiety, sense of direction, and familiarity with the UMG campus. They were also given three performance tasks probing landmark, route, and survey knowledge of the UMG campus. Correlational analyses showed a significant association between place identity and all the environmental knowledge tasks, while spatial anxiety was significantly associated only with the performance in the survey knowledge task. However, the logistic regression models suggested only a contribution of place identity to landmark knowledge and no effect of spatial anxiety when familiarity and the self-reported sense of direction were considered. We propose that the emotional bond with a place could have a positive effect only in retrieving the visual features of navigational objects (i.e., landmarks), but future studies should expand on the topic with research paradigms involving the actual navigation of a real environment.

The ability to orient and navigate successfully in large-scale space is crucial in daily life and develops gradually during childhood. The present study aimed to investigate whether an observational training - in which children observe an actor exploring an environment - fosters the acquisition of spatial orientation skills in children 4.6 7.4 years of age, specifically improving their ability to efficiently explore a previously observed environment (familiar) or even a never observed one (unfamiliar). With this aim, we administered - or not - the observational training and tested children on a modified version of the Open Field with multiple rewards (OFmr) task to evaluate the children's explorative behavior and their landmark, route, and configural knowledge. We found that observational training improved both route and configural knowledge fostering the use of both egocentric and allocentric coding requested to solve the OFmr. The beneficial effect was not only limited to when children navigated in a familiar environment but, more importantly, it was present also when they had to navigate in a new environment. As a result of observational training, children moved through the environment to collect the rewards adopting a more organized and structured explorative behavior. Moreover, observational training also exerted a beneficial effect on cognitive mapping abilities, improving the children's capacity of transforming the egocentric information acquired during the navigation into an allocentric world-centered representation. Overall, these findings indicate that observational training promotes an earlier acquisition of high-level spatial abilities and brings new insights on the role of observation in promoting spatial skills in children.

Background Previous literature has shown that executive functions (EF) are related to performance in memory (M) tasks. The Test of Memory strategies (TMS) is a psychometric test that examines EF and M simultaneously and it was recently validated on an Italian healthy cohort. The first aim of the study was to apply TMS, for the first time, on a sample of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), who are characterized by mild cognitive impairment. The second aim is to investigate whether TMS scores can discriminate PD patients from healthy controls. Method Ninety-eight subjects were enrolled, including 68 patients with PD, and 30 Italian healthy controls (HC), who also underwent a memory evaluation through well-known tests. Results Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated that TMS of PD patients had a bi-dimensional structure as previously found in healthy cohort. In detail, The TMS-1 and TMS-2 lists require greater involvement of the EF factor, while TMS-3, TMS-4 and TMS-5 the M factor. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and precision-recall (PR) curves showed that the M subscale can distinguish between HC and PD, while EF had poor discrimination power. Conclusion The hypothesized prediction model of TMS test seems to have adequate ability to discriminate PD from HC especially for the M function.

Spatial orientation and navigation are fundamental abilities in daily life that develop gradually during childhood, although their development is still not clear. The main aim of the present narrative review was to trace the development of navigational skills in middle childhood (6 to 12 years old) by means of studies present in the literature. To this aim, this review took into account the terminology, methodologies, different paradigms, and apparatuses used to investigate egocentric self-centered and allocentric world-centered representations, besides the different types of spaces (reaching/small/large; physical/virtual). Furthermore, this review provided a brief description of the development of navigational strategies and competences in toddlers and preschool children (0–5 years). The main result of this review showed how middle childhood is a crucial period for the improvement and development of allocentric strategies, including metric information. In fact, during this developmental window, children learn to handle proximal and distal cues, to transpose paper and virtual information into real environments, up to performing similarly to adults. This narrative review could represent a starting point to better clarify the development of navigation and spatial orientation, finalized to trace a development curve useful to map normal development and to have a term of comparison to assess performance in atypical development.