Do not get lost in translation: The role of egocentric heading in spatial orientation

A Novel Virtual Reality-Based Training Protocol for the Enhancement of the “Mental Frame Syncing” in Individuals with Alzheimer's Disease: A Development-of-Concept Trial

“…Although there are more user-friendly, immersive and low-cost rehabilitative technologies (e.g., Oculus Rift, for a review see Castelvecchi, 2016), it is possible to develop a training program in which the interactive aerial view rotates according to the orientation of the participants' heading direction. In our previous study carried out in a CAVE, we found that the presence of a small interactive aerial view of a virtual city, including a visualized larger arrow indicating the heading direction, was able to facilitate spatial recall (Serino et al, 2015a). These outcomes emphasized the crucial role of a larger visualized arrow in order to retrieve the correct path; this arrow worked as a “external aid” in reinforcing participants' “mental frame syncing” by giving them information about their heading direction in the environment.…”

Neurorehabilitation of Spatial Memory Using Virtual Environments: A Systematic Review

“…Additionally, some studies have already demonstrated that the use of a map as a navigational aid improved the performance of users performing complex navigational tasks [66]. Furthermore, the presence of a small-scale interactive aerial view facilitated the retrieval of stored spatial layout and an arrow or salient landmarks, giving more comprehensive information about the egocentric heading in environment, were effective in supporting the navigation [67,68]. Also, findings in the studies examined underline the importance of using active navigation protocols to promote the neurorehabilitation of spatial memory [62,67], and that the degree of the visual similarities between the virtual world and the real one boosts the transfer of learning between contexts [57].…”

Propuesta de una interfaz cognitiva para la exploración distante de entornos virtuales como ayuda a las personas ciegas durante la creación de mapas cognitivos

“…Spatial knowledge has been observed to be encoded relative to different types of frames of reference. Traditionally, spatial knowledge was considered to be encoded relative to either an egocentric or an allocentric frame of reference (Iachini, Ruggiero, & Ruotolo, 2014;Manning, Lew, Li, Sekuler, & Kahana, 2014;Serino et al, 2015) in addition, Mou & McNamara (2002) proposed an additional type: the intrinsic frame of reference. For an egocentric frame of reference, the conceptual north is selected relative to one's body itself; thus, landmark locations are described in a self-to-object manner, to further complicate things, multiple egocentric frames of reference may coexist each of them anchored to a different body part (Wolbers & Wiener, 2014).…”

“…It has been suggested that wayfinding tasks (i.e., route planning) rely mostly on allocentric information while navigation tasks (e.g., route following) rely mostly on egocentric information (Meilinger, Frankenstein, & Bülthoff, 2013;Wolbers & Wiener, 2014). A bidirectional relationship between these two types of representations has been observed to be mediated by the posterior parietal and retrosplenial areas of the brain (Byrne, Becker, & Burgess, 2007) and to support people's orientation while navigating across a given environment; in fact, emphasising egocentric heading information within an egocentric representation of said environment facilitated navigation more than a more detailed planar map representation (Serino et al, 2015). An additional property of spatial knowledge is the orientation in which the frame of reference is stored.…”

“…The relationship between the type of frame of reference and the orientation is not clear (Manning, Lew, Li, Sekuler, & Kahana, 2014;. Though, according to Serino et al (2015) the CA3 region in the hippocampus has been observed by Behrendt (2013) to process allocentric information in a viewpoint-dependent manner and later feed that information to the CA1 region, where it is encoded as allocentric viewpoint-independent knowledge. At a symbolic level, spatial knowledge in navigation space is described as a hierarchy of different types of knowledge (Siegel & White, 1975;Tussyadiah & Zach, 2012;Weisberg, Schinazi, Newcombe, Shipley, & Epstein, 2014).…”