Environmental Boundaries and Road Regularity in Virtual Reality: Examining Their Effects on Navigation Performance and Spatial Cognition

Abstract

This study investigated how environmental boundaries and road regularity influence people navigating through Virtual Reality (VR) and constructing cognitive maps. Thirty-six younger adults participated in the VR experiment, where they navigated in two different roads (a regular road and an irregular road) on three types of environmental boundaries (no boundary, square boundary, and trapezoidal boundary) to learn virtual environments and locate a reward. The results of the experiment showed that environmental boundaries and participants’ spatial ability had significant influences on cognitive map construction. In regular road environments, participants constructed worse cognitive maps when navigating in the trapezoidal boundary than in the square boundary. In addition, the better spatial ability the participants had, the better cognitive map they constructed. These results give insights into researches on how older adults use spatial geometric cues including environmental boundaries and road regularity when navigating.