No abstract

Four groups of undergraduates (half of each gender) experienced a movement along a corridor containing three distinctive objects, in a virtual environment (VE) with wide-screen projection. One group simulated walking along the virtual corridor using a proprietary step-exercise device. A second group moved along the corridor in conventional flying mode, depressing a keyboard key to initiate continuous forward motion. Two further groups observed the walking and flying participants, by viewing their progress on the screen. Participants then had to walk along a real equivalent but empty corridor, and indicate the positions of the three objects. All groups underestimated distances in the real corridor, the greatest underestimates occurring for the middle distance object. Males' underestimations were significantly lower than females' at all distances. However, there was no difference between the active participants and passive observers, nor between walking and flying conditions.

Active exploration is better than passive observation of spatial displacements in real environments, for the acquisition of relational spatial information by children.However, a previous study using a virtual environment (VE) showed that children in a passive observation condition performed better than actives. The active children were unpractised in using the input device, which may have detracted from any active advantage, since input device operation may be regarded as a concurrent task, increasing cognitive load and spatial working memory demands.To investigate this hypothesis, 7-8 year-old children in the present study were given 5 minutes of training with the joystick input device. When compared with passive participants for spatial learning, by having them reconstruct in reality the environment explored virtually, active participants gave a better performance than passives, placing objects significantly more accurately. The importance of interface training when using VEs for assessment and training was discussed.Running header: interface familiarity and virtual spatial learning

Historically, real-world studies have indicated a spatial learning advantage for people who actively explore the environment they inhabit as opposed to those whose experience is more passive. A common contrast is made between the spatial learning of car drivers and passengers. However, compared with walking and other forms of transportation, car-driving experience per se has a special status. An experiment was conducted to explore the dual hypotheses that active explorers learn more about the layout of a virtual environment (VE) than passive observers and that real-world car drivers will learn more regardless of their experimental active/passive status. Participants explored a virtual model of a small town in active/passive, pairs. Active exploration was self-directed and goal driven, and all learning tasks were explicit. Consistent with many earlier studies in VEs, there was no benefit from activity (controlling exploration/movement), arguably because input control competes with spatial information acquisition. When participants were divided according to whether they were licensed drivers or not, the results showed that drivers were significantly more accurate than non-drivers at indicating the positions of target locations on a map, in both the active and passive conditions. An interaction showed that in the active condition, drivers had significantly better route scores than non-drivers, and better than drivers in the passive condition. Driving may therefore be beneficial for spatial abilities over and above the general benefits of "activity" and when spatial skills are examined in VEs, driver experience is an important criterion that should be taken into account.

While active explorers in a real-world environment typically remember more about its spatial layout than participants who passively observe that exploration, this does not reliably occur when the exploration takes place in a virtual environment (VE). We argue that this may be because an active explorer in a VE is effectively performing a secondary interfering concurrent task by virtue of having to operate a manual input device to control their virtual displacements. Six groups of participants explored a virtual room containing six distributed objects, either actively or passively while performing concurrent tasks that were simple (such as card turning) or that made more complex cognitive and motoric demands comparable with those typically imposed by input device control. Tested for their memory for virtual object locations, passive controls (with no concurrent task) demonstrated the best spatial learning, arithmetically (but not significantly) better than the active group. Passive groups given complex concurrent tasks performed as poorly as the active group. A concurrent articulatory suppression task reduced memory for object names but not spatial location memory. It was concluded that spatial demands imposed by input device control should be minimized when training or testing spatial memory in VEs, and should be recognized as competing for cognitive capacity in spatial working memory.