The Room Effect: Exploring Paths and Rooms in a Desktop Virtual Environment With Objects Grouped Categorically and Spatially

Abstract

People rapidly learn the spatial layout of the interior of rooms when they navigate through a building to perform everyday tasks in a simulated environment, a phenomenon called the room effect. Three experiments showed that the room effect did not depend on the categorical or functional utilization of rooms or on the exploration routes taken. Although there was a strong effect of whether or not the objects in the rooms all came from the same category or not, this object organization effect was independent of the room effect. Second, the room effect was just as strong when objects in different rooms were visited successively as it was when all objects in a room were visited before moving to the next room. The results are difficult to explain from the landmark-route-survey model or other extant explanations. A characteristic enclosure framework explanation is proposed.