Navigation is the most common interactive task performed in three-dimensional virtual environments (VEs), but it is also a task that users often find difficult. We investigated how body-based information about the translational and rotational components of movement helped participants to perform a navigational search task (finding targets hidden inside boxes in a room-sized space). When participants physically walked around the VE while viewing it on a head-mounted display (HMD) then they performed 90 % of trials perfectly, comparable to participants who had performed an equivalent task in the real world during a previous study. By contrast, participants performed less than 50 % of trials perfectly if they used a tethered HMD (move by physically turning but pressing a button to translate) or a desktop display (no body-based information). This is the most complex navigational task in which a real-world level of performance has been achieved in a VE. Behavioral data indicate that both translational and rotational body-based information are required to accurately update one’s position during navigation, and participants who walked tended to avoid obstacles even though collision detection was not implemented and feedback not provided. A walking interface would bring immediate benefits to a number of VE applications.

For many centuries, philosophers and scientists have pondered the origins and nature of human intuitions about the properties of points, lines, and figures on the Euclidean plane, with most hypothesizing that a system of Euclidean concepts either is innate or is assembled by general learning processes. Recent research from cognitive and developmental psychology, cognitive anthropology, animal cognition, and cognitive neuroscience suggests a different view. Knowledge of geometry may be founded on at least two distinct, evolutionarily ancient, core cognitive systems for representing the shapes of large-scale, navigable surface layouts and of small-scale, movable forms and objects. Each of these systems applies to some but not all perceptible arrays and captures some but not all of the three fundamental Euclidean relationships of distance (or length), angle, and direction (or sense). Like natural number (Carey, 2009), Euclidean geometry may be constructed through the productive combination of representations from these core systems, through the use of uniquely human symbolic systems.

The effect of landmark and body-based sensory information on route knowledge

In phase 1, participants memorized two two-dimensional maps consisting of routes with concrete landmark features and two maps consisting of routes with abstract landmark features and then made distance estimates and mental walks for the routes on each map. Participants estimated significantly longer lengths for routes with concrete features versus abstract features, for routes with four versus two features, and for routes with linear sequences of features versus clustered features. In phase 2, a feature recognition task indicated that participants had significantly greater accuracy and faster response times for concrete features versus abstract features and for features that had appeared in linear arrangements versus clustered arrangements. Our results suggest that the number, type, and configuration of landmark features can distort humans ’ memories of path lengths, even when the paths are originally viewed on a simple two-dimensional map rather than encountered through embodied experience.

This is a preprint of an Article accepted for publication in Psychological Science ©

Mammalian navigation depends both on visual landmarks and on self-generated (e.g., vestibular and proprioceptive) cues that signal the organism’s own movement [1–5]. When these conflict, landmarks can either reset estimates of selfmotion or be integrated with them [6–9]. We asked how humans combine these information sources and whether children, who use both from a young age [10–12], combine them as adults do. Participants attempted to return an object to its original place in an arena when given either visual landmarks only, nonvisual self-motion information only, or both. Adults, but not 4- to 5-year-olds or 7- to 8-year-olds, reduced their response variance when both information sources were available. In an additional ‘‘conflict’ ’ condition that measured relative reliance on landmarks and self-motion, we predicted behavior under two models: integration (weighted averaging)