Using desktop virtual environments to investigate the role of landmarks
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 10 students (average age: 25.85 years) at the Gerhard-Mercator-University in Duisburg, Germany.
Materials
The experiment was conducted on a PC with Superscape's VRT 4.00 software. A maze was programmed that corresponded to the system of paths Cohen and Schuepfer (1980) used in their study. The maze was presented to participants on a 17 inch screen. They “walked” through the maze by using a joystick. Fig. 1 presents a hardcopy of a bird's eye view of the maze.
The maze consisted of six
Results
The path participants took was recorded for analysis. The arrow trace from the bird's eye view of the maze shows whenever they strayed from the way to the destination (Fig. 3)
Table 1 shows the number of learning trials until the criterion was reached and the number of wrong turns per trial (errors) for the different conditions. Error-free trials were not used in computing these performance parameters.
The statistic shows that the maze is traveled more often when it did not contain landmarks than
Discussion
Cohen and Schuepfer's (1980) findings concerning the relevance of landmarks in learning a route, could be replicated even with a small sample size in a virtual environment on a mid-range computer system. Whereas Cohen and Schuepfer (1980) obtained their results with a design that appears extraordinarily artificial and complex, the participants in this study could actively navigate. Landmarks do indeed aid orientation when finding the way, and a route with landmarks is learned faster than one
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Frank P. Schulte for his help writing this manuscript.
Petra Jansen-Osmann holds a Master's Degree in Biological and Social Anthropology and Psychology from Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg. She is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany. Her research is concerned with human spatial cognition and behavior in natural and virtual environments and motor development.
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Petra Jansen-Osmann holds a Master's Degree in Biological and Social Anthropology and Psychology from Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg. She is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany. Her research is concerned with human spatial cognition and behavior in natural and virtual environments and motor development.