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Spatial Orientation and Disorientation
Published in Anthony N. Nicholson, The Neurosciences and the Practice of Aviation Medicine, 2017
Allothetic cues, as conventionally defined, allow navigation by the use of landmarks. Idiothetic cues facilitate navigation by a process termed path integration, or what a sailor would know as dead reckoning – a knowledge of present position derived from a previously known position and the distance travelled in a known direction. In a visually rich environment it seems likely that allothetic cues predominate, but there is still a requirement for them to remain concordant with internally derived sensory information. Path integration on the basis of vestibular cues alone would be prone to accumulated errors and can only be relied on for relatively short periods of time.
Human spatial learning strategies in wormhole virtual environments
Published in Spatial Cognition & Computation, 2023
Christopher Widdowson, Ranxiao Frances Wang
The present study used the desktop VR system with purely visual navigation due to difficulties in implementing non-Euclidean environments in Euclidean physical space. Path integration can use multiple cues, such as visual, vestibular, proprioceptive, motor command, etc., and performance is generally better when more cues are available. Although it has been shown that body-based cues are important sources of information for path integration and can improve navigation performance, it has also been shown that path integration and spatial learning tasks can be performed effectively with visual information alone, especially when stable landmarks are present, as in the present study (e.g., Riecke, Veen & Bülthoff, 2002). Moreover, desktop VR has been widely used to study spatial representations, spatial learning and navigation, both in basic research and in applied settings such as education and training (e.g., Hegarty, Montello, Richardson, Ishikawa & Lovelace, 2006; Jansen-Osmann, 2002; Otto et al., 2003; Wiener & Mallot, 2006; Zhao et al., 2020). In addition, performance of the Euclidean condition in the present study also showed that participants were capable of learning the environment based on pure visual navigation. Thus, we believe the usage of the desktop VR in the present study is valid and the findings are meaningful. Future research incorporating body-based cues can further examine the effects of different self-motion cues on the type of information people would preserve when constructing Euclidean representations of non-Euclidean environments.
Desktop versus immersive virtual environments: effects on spatial learning
Published in Spatial Cognition & Computation, 2020
Jiayan Zhao, Tesalee Sensibaugh, Bobby Bodenheimer, Timothy P. McNamara, Alina Nazareth, Nora Newcombe, Meredith Minear, Alexander Klippel
Gallistel (1990) and Gallistel and Matzel (2013) provide an alternative perspective on why continuous travel might not result in better spatial learning outcomes than teleportation. The authors indicate that individuals can determine their positions relative to non-visible places using two types of navigation systems: path integration and piloting (see also Mou & Wang, 2015; Zhang & Mou, 2017). As mentioned in footnote 20, path integration is the process of using self-motion cues (e.g., vestibular cues, proprioceptive cues, and optic flow) to estimate one’s traveled distance and moving direction, and then calculating the location of a non-visible target on the traversed path. Piloting is the other way of estimating one’s position, during which navigators estimate the location of a non-visible target by relying on some visible items (e.g., landmarks) and the spatial relations between the visible items and the non-visible target (Mou & Wang, 2015). Although people usually use both navigation systems in everyday navigation (Zhang & Mou, 2017), it is possible that the piloting system became dominant during spatial learning in Virtual Silcton, leading to a similar performance between desktop continuous travel and desktop teleportation participants. First, because body-based senses (pertaining to self-motion cues) were not available in the two desktop conditions, the path integration system can be assumed to be less reliable than the piloting system. Second, Virtual Silcton contains a plethora of visual landmarks, which could foster the development of piloting by resetting and removing errors accumulated in the path integration system after disorientation (Nardini, Jones, Bedford & Braddick, 2008; Zhang & Mou, 2017). Considering the advantage of piloting over path integration, continuous viewpoint transitions along with other self-motion cues would have little effect on spatial learning, particularly when participants needed to travel over a long distance to learn the locations of multiple targets and their spatial relations in such a large-scale outdoor VE.