Active Versus Passive Acquisition of Spatial Knowledge While Controlling a Vehicle in a Virtual Urban Space in Drivers and Non-Drivers

Abstract

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.

Virtual Enactment Effect on Memory in Young and Aged Populations: A Systematic Review

“…Graphic realism when building VEs should take into account the fact that a detailed environment positively affects memory performances [77]. Other elements that neuroscientists in the field of VR and memory should consider are the type of encoding (incidental vs. intentional); although the authors of [62] showed no effect of encoding, in our review intentional encoding leads to better performance across the populations and the type of memory assessed [8,9,43,58,59,67,68,69,70,75,80]. Crucially, only one study [72] compared active VR vs. passive VR vs. real-world navigation, with real-world navigation and active VR leading to better spatial recall, in this order, compared to passive VR.…”

Global Determinants of Navigation Ability

“…While GDP and GGI have a strong predictive influence on navigation ability, other country-level factors might influence navigation ability. Evidence suggests that driving rather than taking public transport has a positive effect on spatial knowledge [33,34]. While this might explain why North Americans and Australians are particularly successful as populations compared to equivalent (GDP) European countries that rely more on public transport [35,36], it fails to explain why the Nordic countries perform so well as a group.…”

Interactivity in map learning: The effect of cognitive load

“…The notion that active learning can affect spatial knowledge acquisition in cognitively demanding tasks has been suggested in the context of virtual navigation studies. Sandamas and Foreman (2014; see also Sandamas & Foreman, 2015) reported findings consistent with the hypothesis that using an input device (e.g., a joystick or keyboard) in a virtual environment can increase cognitive demands and may compete for cognitive capacity in working memory, making it difficult to find differences between active and passive participants in computer-simulated environments. While we did not employ an input device here, it may be argued that in this study, active learners were affected by giving verbal directions to the experimenter during the learning phase.…”