Colour as an environmental cue when learning a route in a virtual environment: typical and atypical development.
Easy-to-name color cues don’t speed route learning but do improve later recall for both typical kids and individuals with Williams syndrome.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a simple virtual maze on a computer screen. Kids had to walk a cartoon boy from school to home.
Some paths had bright, easy-to-name colors like red or blue. Other paths used muddy, hard-to-name colors.
They tested three groups: typical kids, kids with Williams syndrome, and kids with mild learning problems. Each child walked the route five times.
What they found
All groups learned the route just as fast, no matter which colors they saw.
Later, when asked to point to the colors they had seen, kids remembered the bright, nameable colors better.
Kids with Williams syndrome named and recalled the bright colors almost as well as typical kids.
How this fits with other research
Morris et al. (2020) also found that the best assessment tool depends on what the child can already do. Here, verbal color skill, not the cue itself, drove memory.
Wilkins et al. (2009) showed that knowing a skill (like naming an emotion) does not guarantee using it in real life. Likewise, naming a color did not speed up route learning—only later recall.
Aishworiya et al. (2021) stress that early child factors shape later outcomes. This study adds that a child’s verbal coding skill is one of those key factors.
Why it matters
When you teach navigation or safety drills, bright, easy-to-name colors can boost later recall, especially for learners with Williams syndrome. Do not expect the colors to speed initial learning—use them as review cues instead. Ask the child to name the color out loud; the verbal label locks it into memory.
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Join Free →After the learner walks the route, point to each landmark and ask, “What color was that?”—use bright red, blue, or green items to boost recall.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Typically developing (TD) 6-year-olds and 9-year-olds, and older children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) navigated through brick-wall mazes in a virtual environment. Participants were shown a route through three mazes, each with 6 turns. In each maze the floor of each path section was a different colour such that colour acted as an environmental cue. The colours employed were either easy to verbalise (focal colours) or difficult to verbalise (non-focal colours). We investigated whether participants would verbally code the colour information in the focal colour condition only, and whether this facilitated route-learning. All groups could learn the routes; the WS group required more learning trials to learn the route and achieved lower memory scores than both of the TD groups. Despite this, all groups showed the same pattern of results. There was no effect of condition on the ability to learn the maze. However, when asked which colours featured in each route, higher memory scores were achieved for the focal colour (verbalisable) than the non-focal colour (non-verbalisable) condition. This suggests that, in both young children and individuals with WS, once a route has been learnt, the nature of the environmental cues within it can impact an individual's representation of that route.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2012 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.11.017