Research in Neuroscience and Virtual Reality

Solaz, Beatriz Rey; Alcañíz, Mariano

doi:10.5772/13198

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(61 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Enforcing identical conditions for all participants or specifically controlling the stimuli between participants to optimize task design is difficult to realize in real-world experiments. Potentially disturbing factors in the real world, like weather conditions, traffic, and noise, are difficult to control ( Gillner and Mallot, 1998 ; Rey and Alcañiz, 2010 ). In the real world a topographical layout that is readily available can be used, or a layout has to be constructed, which can be time and money consuming.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This high level of control improves the validity of the navigation studies ( Schultheis et al, 2002 ). The lack of contextual factors however, makes a laboratory setting less realistic ( Rey and Alcañiz, 2010 ). An additional advantage of VR is that it enables easy capture of precise data, for example a participant’s movement pattern over time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An additional advantage of VR is that it enables easy capture of precise data, for example a participant’s movement pattern over time. This means that research data becomes more readily available and is more precise than it would normally be ( Rey and Alcañiz, 2010 ; Dombeck and Reiser, 2012 ). The advantages of VR imply that it can provide a reasonable alternative to traditional navigation research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If differences are found in navigation ability after studying a real or a virtual environment, this could well be due to the difference in locomotion between the conditions, as locomotion is present in typical experiments in a real environment and absent in most experiments using virtual input. As locomotion provides additional sensory input during learning ( Klatzky et al, 1998 ; Rey and Alcañiz, 2010 ; Chrastil and Warren, 2013 ), it could be that performance increases when locomotion is part of the learning phase.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Ecological validity of virtual environments to assess human navigation ability

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Route memory is frequently assessed in virtual environments. These environments can be presented in a fully controlled manner and are easy to use. Yet they lack the physical involvement that participants have when navigating real environments. For some aspects of route memory this may result in reduced performance in virtual environments. We assessed route memory performance in four different environments: real, virtual, virtual with directional information (compass), and hybrid. In the hybrid environment, participants walked the route outside on an open field, while all route information (i.e., path, landmarks) was shown simultaneously on a handheld tablet computer. Results indicate that performance in the real life environment was better than in the virtual conditions for tasks relying on survey knowledge, like pointing to start and end point, and map drawing. Performance in the hybrid condition however, hardly differed from real life performance. Performance in the virtual environment did not benefit from directional information. Given these findings, the hybrid condition may offer the best of both worlds: the performance level is comparable to that of real life for route memory, yet it offers full control of visual input during route learning.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Ecological validity of virtual environments to assess human navigation ability

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Virtual Reality offers a solution for bridging the gap between ecological validity and controllability (Rey & Alcañiz, 2010). Both ecological validity and controllability are important in both VR and neuroscience research, and applications This study proposed and tested a solution that integrates wireless brain imaging and two VR displaysa large IPT VR solution in which users can move more freely -Octave, and a custom fNIRS-adapted Oculus Rift.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%