• human development
• spatial cognition
• virtual reality
• visuomotor integration

Spatial cognition is the ability of the brain to encode spatial features about one’s body position and the position of surrounding items. This information is used to drive actions in space. The scientific debate on how this happens is still open, and few studies try to understand how this ability develops, also due to the difficulty in getting data from children. Moreover, few is known about the interaction between body movements aimed at driving one’s motion in space and vision. In this thesis we present the current knowledge regarding these fields, and our effort to extend this knowledge by studying aspects of the visuomotor integration and interference which have never been studied in detail before. Especially, we studied the effect of the visual input’s influence on the definition of the high-level body and space representations in our brain, and of the consequent head-trunk motor coordination, by controlling three different conditions: the body part used to move in the space, the relationship between the driving and non-driving body part, and the direction of motion. To do it, we made use of a game and of the latest technological tools in the context of the virtual reality, and we test on the game participants from three age groups: 6 years, 10 years and adults. The data we collected say the visuomotor integration follows different developmental paths depending on the body segment of interest, and that, even though between 6 and 10 years of age a massive step towards adulthood takes place, yet at the age of 10 the development has not completed. This study opens many scientific and technologic lines of research. From the scientific perspective, it provides a new approach to study the development of multisensory spatial representations from childhood. From a technological perspective, it supplies new inputs to the development of tools based on immersive virtual reality usable by adults and children. Future efforts will be directed towards 1) the evaluation of the impact of the visuo-motor conflict over the trunk control; 2) the evaluation of the influence the high-level representation has over the control of both head and trunk; 3) the research of differences in the activity of the neural circuits which are thought to be the substrates for sensorimotor integration and spatial encoding.