Improving spatial awareness in physically disabled children using virtual environments

The authors have shown that the spatial performance of disabled children on a shortcut task in a virtual environment (VE) is inferior to able-bodied children, and appears to be related to their early levels of mobility. Despite this, disabled children´s spatial memory and judgement can improve from training in several VEs. The improvement is not due to general practice effects, nor to familiarity with the experimenter; rather, it is due to the three-dimensional nature of the exploration. Crucially, the authors have also shown that spatial information gained from a VE will transfer directly to an equivalent real environment