A virtual reality platform for memory evaluation: Assessing effects of spatial strategies

Acute and chronic physical activity improves spatial memory in an immersive virtual reality task

“…In addition, we have recently demonstrated that to correctly solve our pre-encoding task within the CAVE, the participants needed to use spatial strategies. 20 The virtual reality device allowed the exact reproduction of the conditions between each participant, without depending on the exploration of environmental or climatological factors. Previous studies have shown that spatial information can be reliably transferred between real and virtual reality environments when the virtual reality environment was modeled from the real 35 ; and, that, in some cases, the brain areas involved in both scans are analogous.…”

“…During the pre-encoding (pre-EN, Figure 1 A) phase, 20 the participant was located in the center of the arena with a background consisting of a fairly uniform landscape with some valleys and mountains. At first, a flag appeared in one of the 360 possible random positions within an imaginary circumference of 20 m radius.…”

“…The development of virtual reality environments became particularly useful for spatial cognition research. 19 , 20 Some studies have shown a positive effect of physical activity on this type of memory in rodents and humans. 15 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 But again, most of them have focused on investigating chronic physical activity.…”

Virtual Reality as a Tool to Understand Spatial Navigation

“…The main drawbacks of CAVEs as virtual reality devices for exploring spatial navigation is that they are expensive and require significant tuning and maintenance. While some specialized work on navigation and wayfinding has been done in CAVEs (e.g., (Christou et al, 2016;Marsh et al, 2006;Rodríguez et al, 2021)), this article will not focus on them as an immersive technology medium.…”

“…They found that children were better at within-route versus between-route pointing (as with adults), that "integrators" develop later, and that perspective-taking ability explained a good amount of age-related improvement in pointing accuracy. Examinations of developmental differences in cue use for spatial memory have shown that children use single landmark cues earlier than environmental boundary cues (Glöckner et al, 2021) and that generally object-location memory improves with age (León et al, 2014;Rodríguez et al, 2021).…”