Through the Eyes of a Child: How Eye Tracking Reveals the Hidden Challenges of Wayfinding

Why Navigation Is Harder for Children

Large commercial spaces like shopping malls are designed with adults in mind. For children, navigating these environments can be challenging. Their spatial awareness is still developing, and visual cues that guide adults may not be as accessible or meaningful to them.

Video of a child navigating through a shopping mall, searching for a vintage car museum. Video not related to the research paper, for demonstration purposes only.

When children become disoriented, the consequences go beyond inconvenience. Confusion can quickly turn into stress, increasing the risk of separation from caregivers. Despite this, most wayfinding research has focused on adults, leaving a gap in understanding how children actually experience these spaces.

Tracking Navigation in a Real-World Setting

To address this, Soyoung Choi from the Institute of Construction and Environmental Engineering of the Seoul National University conducted an eye tracking study in a large commercial complex in South Korea. The study included 51 children aged 4 to 9 and 37 adult women, who were instructed to navigate to a restroom and return to their starting point.

To compare the effects of spatial layout, participants completed the task in two areas: a simpler grid-like floor and a more complex floor with an irregular, radial structure.

Using Pupil Invisible eye tracking glasses, gaze behavior was recorded as participants moved freely through the environments. The data were analyzed in Pupil Cloud using Reference Image Mapper. Heatmaps showed where adults and children concentrated their attention, while scanpaths revealed the sequence, location, and duration of individual fixations. These gaze patterns were compared with participants’ journey times, walking distances, and wayfinding success.

Figure 1: Heatmaps showing how adults (A) and children (B) paid attention to the items in the mall before heading to the restroom. Adapted from Choi, S. (2026). Children’s wayfinding characteristics and influencing factors compared with adults using eye-tracking: Focusing on a complex commercial facility in South Korea. Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 1-50.

Figure 2: Scanpaths showing how an adult participant (A) and a child participant (B) scanned through the mall before heading to the restroom. Adapted from Choi, S. (2026). Children’s wayfinding characteristics and influencing factors compared with adults using eye-tracking: Focusing on a complex commercial facility in South Korea. Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 1-50.

What the Eyes Reveal

The study uncovered clear differences in how adults and children visually navigate complex spaces.

• Exploration vs. efficiency: Adults generally identified relevant cues and followed more direct routes. Children took longer, walked farther, and explored more of the environment before reaching their destination, with the clearest differences appearing in the complex floor layout.

• A broader visual search: Children made significantly more fixations than adults at the starting points on both floors, showing that they inspected a wider range of locations before deciding where to go. Fixation duration did not differ significantly, suggesting that the difference was in how broadly they searched rather than how long they looked at each location.

• Looking at eye level instead of overhead: Adults were more likely to notice and use hanging signs. Children also searched for signs, but their attention was more often drawn toward shelves, walls, floors, products, and other features within their immediate field of view.

• Landmarks and distractions: Visually salient objects such as toys, sculptures, and colorful displays frequently captured children’s attention. These elements sometimes became useful landmarks, but they could also distract children from signage or draw them away from the shortest route.

• What makes signage work for children: Eye tracking showed which signs children noticed, while interviews helped establish whether they understood them. Signs combining pictograms with text were clearer than text-only information or ambiguous pictograms. Visibility also mattered: shelves, walls, and displays could obstruct children’s view of directional cues.

Together, these findings suggest that children do not simply navigate less efficiently than adults. They rely on different visual strategies shaped by their height, attention, and developing spatial awareness.

Designing Child-Friendly Spaces

Children do not navigate spaces the same way adults do. They rely on different visual strategies, focus on cues at their own eye level, and are more easily drawn to distracting elements.

For designers and planners, this means rethinking wayfinding from a child’s perspective by placing signage within their field of view, combining pictograms with text, reducing visual obstructions, and using clear, recognizable landmarks.

Wearable eye tracking makes these differences visible, offering a practical way to design environments that are safer, more inclusive, and easier to navigate for everyone.

Further Resources

• Full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13467581.2026.2620931

• Research Centers:

  • Institute of Construction and Environmental Engineering, Seoul, South Korea

  • Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea