Moderating the route angularity effect in a virtual environment: Support for a dual memory representation

Hutcheson, Adam T.; Wedell, Douglas H.

doi:10.3758/mc.37.4.514

Cited by 10 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 18 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…While both short-and long-radius targets were underestimated, underestimation was significantly greater for the long-radius targets (M 0 −180.64) than for the short-radius targets (M 0 −107.36), which were closer to the central starting point for navigation. These results are consistent with underestimation of distances in VE environments (Foreman, Sandamas, & Newson, 2004;Hutcheson & Wedell, 2009) and appear to have a similar form in that the further the actual distance, the greater the underestimation.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 79%

From maps to navigation: The role of cues in finding locations in a virtual environment

Hutcheson

Wedell

2012

Mem Cogn

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In two experiments, participants navigated through a large arena within a virtual environment (VE) to a location encoded in memory from a map. In both experiments, participants recalled locations by navigating through the VE, but in Experiment 2, they additionally recalled the locations on the original map. Two cues were located outside and above the walls of the arena at either north-south locations or east-west locations. The pattern of angular bias was used to infer how the cues affected the creation of spatial categories influencing memory for location in the two tasks. When participants navigated to remembered locations in the VE, two cue-based spatial categories were inferred, with cues serving to demarcate the boundaries of the categories. When participants remembered locations on the original map, two cue-based categories were again formed, but with cues serving as category prototypes. The pattern of results implies that cue-based spatial categorization schemes may be formulated differently at the memory retrieval stage depending on task constraints.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 79%

From maps to navigation: The role of cues in finding locations in a virtual environment

Hutcheson

Wedell

2012

Mem Cogn

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“…Some researchers extend this approach by using the development engines of various games to create gamelike environments for the exploration of spatial cognition and social behavior (Alloway, Corley, & Ramscar, 2006;Drury et al, 2009;Frey, Hartig, Ketzel, Zinkernagel, & Moosbrugger, 2007;Gunzelmann & Anderson, 2006;Hutcheson & Wedell, 2009;Radvansky & Copeland, 2006). This type of experiment is less common in cognitive psychology than other gamelike experiments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gamelike features might not improve data

et al. 2012

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Many psychological experiments require participants to complete lots of trials in a monotonous task, which often induces boredom. An increasingly popular approach to alleviate such boredom is to incorporate gamelike features into standard experimental tasks. Games are assumed to be interesting and, hence, motivating, and better motivated participants might produce better data (with fewer lapses in attention and greater accuracy). Despite its apparent prevalence, the assumption that gamelike features improve data is almost completely untested. We test this assumption by presenting a choice task and a change detection task in both gamelike and standard forms. Response latency, accuracy, and overall task performance were unchanged by gamelike features in both experiments. We present a novel cognitive model for the choice task, based on particle filtering, to decorrelate the dependent variables and measure performance in a more psychologically meaningful manner. The model-based analyses are consistent with the hypothesis that gamelike features did not alter cognition. A postexperimental questionnaire indicated that the gamelike version provided a more positive and enjoyable experience for participants than the standard task, even though this subjective experience did not translate into data effects. Although our results hold only for the two experiments examined, the gamelike features we incorporated into both tasks were typical of-and at least as salient and interesting as those usually used by-experimental psychologists. Our results suggest that modifying an experiment to include gamelike features, while leaving the basic task unchanged, may not improve the quality of the data collected, but it may provide participants with a better experimental experience.

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“…The authors interpreted these results as consistent with an information storage account of the feature accumulation effect; remembered route length scales with the amount of information, spatial or otherwise, associated with that route in memory. Hutcheson and Wedell (2009) provide a theoretical explanation of the feature accumulation effect, based on dual memory systems, that refines the information storage account. They showed that the feature accumulation effect increases when a concurrent task is included during path encoding or when a distractor task is included during a delay period between encoding and responding.…”

Section: Features Make Paths Seem Longermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Experiment 2 asks whether the distractor effect can be obtained even when visual information is available at encoding. Third, the feature accumulation effect increases when a filled delay occurs between encoding and responding (Hutcheson & Wedell, 2009), but the distractor effect has been observed only when encoding immediately precedes responding. There is support, reviewed above, for the idea that the feature accumulation effect arises from the influence of nonmetric spatial information on distance estimation (e.g., paths with more segments seem longer, regardless of the metric properties of the segments).…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This variety of feature accumulation effect, termed the angularity effect, has been replicated using different numbers of turns, different behavioral measures of path length (e.g., reproduction of walking distances) (Sadalla & Magel, 1980, Ex. 2 & 3), and in virtual reality (Hutcheson & Wedell, 2009;Jansen-Osmann & Berendt, 2002).…”

Section: Features Make Paths Seem Longermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Distraction Shrinks Space

Sargent¹,

Zacks²,

Philbeck³

et al. 2013

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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Research investigating how people remember the distance of paths they walk has shown two apparently conflicting effects of experience during encoding on subsequent distance judgments. By the feature accumulation effect discrete path features such as turns, houses or other landmarks cause an increase in remembered distance. By the distractor effect performance of a concurrent task during path encoding causes a decrease in remembered distance. This study asks: What are the conditions that determine whether the feature accumulation or the distractor effect dominates distortions of space? In two experiments, blindfolded participants were guided along two legs of a right triangle while reciting nonsense syllables. On some trials, one of the two legs contained features: horizontally mounted car antennas (gates) that bent out of the way as participants walked past. At the end of the second leg participants either indicated the remembered path leg lengths using their hands in a ratio estimation task, or attempted to walk, unguided, straight back to the beginning. In addition to response mode, visual access to the paths and time between encoding and response were manipulated to determine if these factors affected feature accumulation or distractor effects. Path legs with added features were remembered as shorter than those without, but this result was only significant in the haptic response mode data. This finding suggests that when people form spatial memory representations with the intention of navigating in room-scale spaces, interfering with information accumulation substantially distorts spatial memory.Knowledge of distances helps humans navigate, remain oriented, plan routes and give directions. Attempts to measure mental representations of distance produce varying results depending in large part on how the distances are encoded and recalled (for reviews see Montello, 1997;. Previous studies have shown that across a range of circumstances, paths with more features (e.g., turns, intersections, landmarks) tend to be remembered as longer than paths with fewer features. In contrast, two studies by Glasauer and colleagues (Glasauer, Schneider, Grasso & Ivanenko, 2007;Glasauer et al., 2009) have shown that paths walked while counting backward by sevens are perceived as shorter than paths walked without a concurrent task. The current study examines the effects of path features on remembered distance for paths walked with a concurrent task. By using a conjunction of the conditions that give rise to the expanding and shrinking of distance representations, we aim to understand the mechanisms responsible for these contrasting, systematic distortions in spatial memory.

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Moderating the route angularity effect in a virtual environment: Support for a dual memory representation

Cited by 10 publications

References 18 publications

From maps to navigation: The role of cues in finding locations in a virtual environment

From maps to navigation: The role of cues in finding locations in a virtual environment

Gamelike features might not improve data

Distraction Shrinks Space

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