The shape of human navigation: how environmental geometry is used in maintenance of spatial orientation

Abstract

The role of environmental geometry in maintaining spatial orientation was measured in immersive virtual reality using a spatial updating task (requiring maintenance of orientation during locomotion) within rooms varying in rotational symmetry (the number of room orientations providing the same perspective). Spatial updating was equally good in trapezoidal, rectangular and square rooms (one-fold, two-fold and four-fold rotationally symmetric, respectively) but worse in a circular room (infinity-fold rotationally symmetric). This contrasts with reorientation performance, which was incrementally impaired by increasing rotational symmetry. Spatial updating performance in a shape-changing room (containing visible corners and flat surfaces, but changing its shape over time) was no better than performance in a circular room, indicating that superior spatial updating performance in angular environments was due to remembered room shape, rather than improved self-motion perception in the presence of visible corners and flat surfaces.

Figure 1

Environments and stimuli used in Experiment 1. Rotational symmetry of the surrounding room decreases from left to right. Filled circles represent locations of posts used in the path integration task.

Figure 2

Perspective view of the square room, from outside the circle of posts (participants never actually experienced this outside view).

Figure 3

Absolute pointing error in Experiment 1 as a function of path length, plotted separately for the four environments. Error bars represent standard errors estimated from the ANOVA.

Figure 4

Absolute pointing error in Experiment 2 as a function of path length, plotted separately for the three environments. Error bars represent standard errors estimated from the ANOVA.