A new psychometric task measuring spatial perspective taking in ambulatory virtual reality

Abstract

Spatial perspective taking is an essential cognitive ability that enables people to imagine how an object or scene would appear from a perspective different from their current physical viewpoint. This process is fundamental for successful navigation, especially when people utilize navigational aids (e.g., maps) and the information provided is shown from a different perspective. Research on spatial perspective taking is primarily conducted using paper-pencil tasks or computerized figural tasks. However, in daily life, navigation takes place in a three-dimensional (3D) space and involves movement of human bodies through space, and people need to map the perspective indicated by a 2D, top down, external representation to their current 3D surroundings to guide their movements to goal locations. In this study, we developed an immersive viewpoint transformation task (iVTT) using ambulatory virtual reality (VR) technology. In the iVTT, people physically walked to a goal location in a virtual environment, using a first-person perspective, after viewing a map of the same environment from a top-down perspective. Comparing this task with a computerized version of a popular paper-and-pencil perspective taking task (SOT: Spatial Orientation Task), the results indicated that the SOT is highly correlated with angle production error but not distance error in the iVTT. Overall angular error in the iVTT was higher than in the SOT. People utilized intrinsic body axes (front/back axis or left/right axis) similarly in the SOT and the iVTT, although there were some minor differences. These results suggest that the SOT and the iVTT capture common variance and cognitive processes, but are also subject to unique sources of error caused by different cognitive processes. The iVTT provides a new immersive VR paradigm to study perspective taking ability in a space encompassing human bodies, and advances our understanding of perspective taking in the real world.

Spatial-positional association of response codes is modulated by the number of items in working memory

“…This test does not assess visuospatial working memory capacity but rather spatial orientation skills such as the ability to imagine different perspectives or orientations in space. In other words, it allows us to assess how participants visualize an object or a place from a different point of view without actually seeing it (He et al, 2022). Thus, because participants with a low performance in the perspective-taking task seemed to spatialize more, one potential explanation for this phenomenon may be a compensatory mechanism (i.e., a low spatial orientation ability might lead to a greater spatialization in working memory).…”

Humans’ Spatial Perspective-Taking When Interacting with a Robotic Arm

“…3: The performance metric as a function of the response time and the experiment steps, i.e., the number of completed questions fixed on a high enough value to ensure a low error position for an accurate drawing. The control was done using the library frankx for collaborative robots 3 .…”

“…Cognitive perspective-taking refers to the ability to understand and interpret others' thoughts, behaviors and beliefs, and it can be referred to as theory of mind. Spatial perspective-taking corresponds to the ability to imagine how an object or a scene would appear from a perspective different from one's current physical viewpoint [3]. In this article, we focus on spatial perspective-taking in a humanrobot interaction scenario.…”