Influence of bidirectional perspective on learning routes and spatial layout

ABSTRACT

The capacity to remain spatially oriented is an essential function in our day to day lives and it seems that the form in which we acquire the spatial information affects the way in which the spatial knowledge is represented in our memory. The goal of this research was to investigate whether the acquisition of spatial information through the learning of three routes within an immersive environment was improved or impaired when participants have access to the backward perspective in addition to the forward perspective. Results, both in reproduction and drawing tasks, showed a poorer performance of the bidirectional group maybe due to the extra-effort involved in updating the spatial information trial by trial. However it seems that the experience enhanced the performance of the bidirectional group in one respect, as they were able to reduce significantly the number of error directions in the last path.

KEYWORDS:

• Change of perspectives
• experience
• interference
• immersive virtual reality
• environment representation

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participants who gave their time. This work was supported by Ficyt 11–144 grant and PSI 2013 42704P project and by grants from the National Science Foundation (HCC 0705863, MRI 0821640; R. Bodenheimer, PI; TPM Co-PI).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.