Applying Psychophysics to Applied Spatial Cognition Research

Abstract

Applied spatial cognition research uses many different methods[1], but studies involving psychophysical methods remain quite rare. Here, we argue for the usefulness of psychophysical methods in spatial cognition and use them to address an applied research question. In the present study, we were interested in how sensitive humans are in detecting mismatches between map perspective and the first-person-view of an environment, and whether they exhibit biases in the perception of street angles. We demonstrate that Psychophysics is well-suited to approach these research questions, and provide the reader with a step-by-step description of how we developed our psychophysical study. In particular, we report which problems have to be solved when combining psychophysical methods with complex stimuli often encountered in spatial cognition, e.g. involving complex VR environments, and present our solutions for experimental design and data collection.