Behavioral achievements are the product of brain maturation. During postnatal development, the medial temporal lobe completes its maturation, and children acquire new memory abilities. In recent years, virtual reality-based tasks have been introduced in the neuropsychology field to assess different cognitive functions. In this work, desktop virtual reality tasks are combined with classic psychometric tests to assess spatial abilities in 4- to 10-year-old children. Fifty boys and 50 girls 4-10-years of age participated in this study. Spatial reference memory and spatial working memory were assessed using a desktop virtual reality-based task. Other classic psychometric tests were also included in this work (e.g., the Corsi Block Tapping Test, digit tests, 10/36 Spatial Recall Test). In general terms, 4- and 5-year-old groups showed poorer performance than the older groups. However, 5-year-old children showed basic spatial navigation abilities with little difficulty. In addition, boys outperformed girls from the 6-8-year-old groups. Gender differences only emerged in the reference-memory version of the spatial task, whereas both sexes displayed similar performances in the working-memory version. There was general improvement in the performance of different tasks in children older than 5 years. However, results also suggest that brain regions involved in allocentric memory are functional even at the age of 5. In addition, the brain structures underlying reference memory mature later in girls than those required for the working memory.

Spatial memory has been studied through different instruments and tools with different modalities of administration. The cognitive load varies depending on the measure used and it should be taken into account to correctly interpret results. The aim of this research was to analyze how men and women perform three different spatial memory tasks with the same spatial context but with different cognitive demands. A total of 287 undergraduate students from the University of Almeria (Spain) and the University of L’Aquila (Italy) participated in the study. They were divided into three groups balanced by sex according to the spatial memory test they performed: the Walking Space Boxes Room Task (WSBRT), the Almeria Spatial Memory Recognition Test (ASMRT) and the Non-Walking Space Boxes Room Task (NWSBRT). Time spent and number of errors/correct answers were registered for analysis. In relation to the WSBRT and the ASMRT, men were faster and reached the optimal level of performance before women. In the three tests, familiarity with the spatial context helped to reduce the number of errors, regardless of the level of difficulty. In conclusion, sex differences were determined by the familiarity with the spatial context, the difficulty level of the task, the active or passive role of the participant and the amount of visual information provided in each screen shot.

Spatial memory is a cognitive ability which declines with ageing thus showing changes in some process such as the use of allocentric strategies. These age-related changes in spatial orientation suggest that this skill could be an adequate marker of cognitive decline. Many tasks used in investigation to assess spatial memory demand a participant’s active role, which involves that the navigational experience is different for everyone. In this study, the Almeria Spatial Memory Recognition Test (ASMRT), a test based on a recognition paradigm, was used to offer the same experience with the environment. The aim of this research was to determine if the ASMRT is suitable to be applied in the elderly and detect spatial memory differences as one age. The ASMRT and other neuropsychological tests were applied in a sample aged between 50and 79 years. Results revealed a decrease in the ASMRT performance by the older group. No gender differences were found. Performance in attention and visuospatial working memory tests revealed some correlations with the ASMRT performance. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that 70–79-year-old participants clearly show age-related changes in spatial memory. Thanks to its simplicity the ASMRT could be used as a screening test in medical practice.

Individual factors like gender and familiarity can affect the kind of environmental representation that a person acquires during spatial navigation. Men seem to prefer relying on map-like survey representations, while women prefer using sequential route representations. Moreover, a good familiarity with the environment allows more complete environmental representations. This study was aimed at investigating gender differences in two different object-position learning tasks (i.e., Almeria Boxes Tasks) assuming a route or a survey perspective also considering the role of environmental familiarity. Two groups of participants had to learn the position of boxes placed in a virtual room. Participants had several trials, so that familiarity with the environment could increase. In both tasks, the effects of gender and familiarity were found, and only in the route perspective did an interaction effect emerge. This suggests that gender differences can be found regardless of the perspective taken, with men outperforming women in navigational tasks. However, in the route task, gender differences appeared only at the initial phase of learning, when the environment was unexplored, and disappeared when familiarity with the environment increased. This is consistent with studies showing that familiarity can mitigate gender differences in spatial tasks, especially in more complex ones.