Historically, real-world studies have indicated a spatial learning advantage for people who actively explore the environment they inhabit as opposed to those whose experience is more passive. A ...common contrast is made between the spatial learning of car drivers and passengers. However, compared with walking and other forms of transportation, car-driving experience per se has a special status. An experiment was conducted to explore the dual hypotheses that active explorers learn more about the layout of a virtual environment (VE) than passive observers and that real-world car drivers will learn more regardless of their experimental active/passive status. Participants explored a virtual model of a small town in active/passive, pairs. Active exploration was self-directed and goal driven, and all learning tasks were explicit. Consistent with many earlier studies in VEs, there was no benefit from activity (controlling exploration/movement), arguably because input control competes with spatial information acquisition. When participants were divided according to whether they were licensed drivers or not, the results showed that drivers were significantly more accurate than non-drivers at indicating the positions of target locations on a map, in both the active and passive conditions. An interaction showed that in the active condition, drivers had significantly better route scores than non-drivers, and better than drivers in the passive condition. Driving may therefore be beneficial for spatial abilities over and above the general benefits of “activity” and when spatial skills are examined in VEs, driver experience is an important criterion that should be taken into account.
•Environmental barriers are a concern for older people in unfamiliar places.•Poor signage, confusing spaces, uneven paving and ‘sensory overload’ act as barriers.•Landmarks and distinctive buildings ...are more important than signage.•The experiences of older people in the environment are important to capture.•Environmental gerontology needs to incorporate a geographical perspective.
A limited number of studies look at older people’s use of space outside the ‘home’ environment, particularly unfamiliar, public urban space. Such unfamiliarity can be created through older people travelling as tourists to new areas; as a consequence of urban regeneration; or as a result of cognitive decline, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar. This paper explores the experiences of older people as pedestrians in unfamiliar urban spaces. In looks at two aspects: older people’s spatial anxieties and the barriers (physical, psychological, spatial and social) they perceive and encounter in unfamiliar surroundings. Forty-four participants who took part in a reality cave exercise and a sub group of 10 people who visited an unfamiliar area as pedestrians describe their experience of walking a predetermined route. Given increasing urbanisation and population ageing this is an area of importance to geographers and gerontologists.
Our study showed that there are a number of barriers that are a concern for older people in new environments; these include poor signage, confusing spaces, poor paving and ‘sensory overload’ i.e. noise and complexity of the environment. Landmarks and distinctive buildings were more important to participants than signage in navigating unfamiliar areas. Such experiences can contribute to practice implications for planners in designing neighbourhoods to support older people. Small changes such as placing distance on clearly marked signage; giving further information about particular areas beyond the key tourist points and using landmarks as clear navigational aids are important. This paper also adds to the growing literature on geographical gerontology.
Performance in the Morris water maze has been widely used in routine behavioural studies of rodents. Since the advent of computer-based virtual environments, adaptations of the water maze have become ...available for human research. Despite decades of comparative neuroscience, formal comparisons of human and animal place navigation performance are rare. We studied 36 subjects, 18 young male mice in a Morris water maze and 18 male students in a virtual version. Quantitative measures (escape latencies, distances and platform crossings) indicated no discernable differences between human and rodent performance, reinforcing the task's general validity and its implied cross-species comparability. However, we extracted, using an a priori free classification method, qualitatively different movement patterns for mice and humans, patterns that reflect the probable strategy that individuals might have been using to solve the task. Our results indicated young male students to have most likely solved the maze by means of spatial strategies whereas mice were observed more often to have adopted non-spatial strategies. These differences could be attributed to differences in our maze setups (spatial cues, task instruction, training protocol, motivation) and gave further hints that maze learning depends on many factors. In summary performance on both spatial tasks was equivalent in humans and mice but the kind of maze learning that was used to achieve maximum performance was different.
Hooded rats with bilateral lesions of the anterior part of the hippocampal formation (HIP), anterior region of the posterior parietal cortex (APC), or posterior region of the posterior parietal ...cortex (PPC) were compared with controls for their exploration of 5 objects in an open field, habituation of locomotion and object investigation, and response to spatial and nonspatial change. First, all groups displayed habituation of both locomotor and exploratory activity. Second, controls selectively reexplored displaced objects, and APC-lesioned rats reexplored all objects, whereas PPC- and HIP-lesioned rats failed to react to the spatial change. Third, a novel object induced reexploration in all groups. The results are consistent with the roles of the HIP and PPC in spatial information processing. Moreover, the APC and PPC are involved in attentional effortful processing and visuospatial information processing necessary for spatial representation, respectively.
This experiment compared the shortcut choices of able-bodied teenagers with those of physically disabled teenagers who had varying histories of mobility impairment. In a computer-simulated ...kite-shaped maze, participants were allowed to explore three arms that connected four rooms. Subsequently they were offered a choice between paths connecting two rooms, one of which was a novel shortcut. Disabled teenagers chose correctly on fewer occasions than their able-bodied counterparts. Despite equivalent current levels of mobility, disabled participants whose mobility was more limited early in development were poorer at the task than those whose mobility had deteriorated with age. The results suggest that early independent exploration is important in the development of spatial knowledge, and suggest that the detrimental effects of limited early exploratory experience may persist into the teenage years.
While active explorers in a real-world environment typically remember more about its spatial layout than participants who passively observe that exploration, this does not reliably occur when the ...exploration takes place in a virtual environment (VE). We argue that this may be because an active explorer in a VE is effectively performing a secondary interfering concurrent task by virtue of having to operate a manual input device to control their virtual displacements. Six groups of participants explored a virtual room containing six distributed objects, either actively or passively while performing concurrent tasks that were simple (such as card turning) or that made more complex cognitive and motoric demands comparable with those typically imposed by input device control. Tested for their memory for virtual object locations, passive controls (with no concurrent task) demonstrated the best spatial learning, arithmetically (but not significantly) better than the active group. Passive groups given complex concurrent tasks performed as poorly as the active group. A concurrent articulatory suppression task reduced memory for object names but not spatial location memory. It was concluded that spatial demands imposed by input device control should be minimized when training or testing spatial memory in VEs, and should be recognized as competing for cognitive capacity in spatial working memory.
▶ Existing walkablity and urban design measures have been adapted to incorporate information from oral narratives with older people obtained when viewing an unfamiliar walking route. ▶ The findings ...indicate that familiarity with some places does not necessarily help older people when navigating and perceiving unfamiliar environments. ▶ Adjustment of built environment scores using information from oral narratives has produced a navigation index capable of being used by local authorities. ▶ Transparency and enclosure in existing urban design quality measure is somewhat redundant for older people and contrary to other research long walls were regarded as an aid to navigation.
Studies of navigation and walkability of the outdoor built environment are now common. However, few have taken a ‘virtual’ approach and in this study we examine the qualitative oral narratives of forty-eight older people provided whilst they watched film footage of a journey around an unfamiliar, urban landscape, and compare them with quantitative measures of the built environment. Pre-film cognitive/psychological tests were carried out, and the participants filled out a questionnaire covering relevant issues such as feelings about home area and navigational behaviour. From the oral narratives we found that signage as well as the presence of historical and distinctive buildings to be central. There was little evidence that perception of residential (familiar) neighbourhood impacted upon commentary about the unfamiliar space suggesting the findings are generalisable to the wider senior citizen demographic and transferable to other localities. We propose a prototype index for urban landscape navigation from these findings.
While active explorers in a real-world environment typically remember more about its spatial layout than participants who passively observe that exploration, this does not reliably occur when the ...exploration takes place in a virtual environment (VE). We argue that this may be because an active explorer in a VE is effectively performing a secondary interfering concurrent task by virtue of having to operate a manual input device to control their virtual displacements. Six groups of participants explored a virtual room containing six distributed objects, either actively or passively while performing concurrent tasks that were simple (such as card turning) or that made more complex cognitive and motoric demands comparable with those typically imposed by input device control. Tested for their memory for virtual object locations, passive controls (with no concurrent task) demonstrated the best spatial learning, arithmetically (but not significantly) better than the active group. Passive groups given complex concurrent tasks performed as poorly as the active group. A concurrent articulatory suppression task reduced memory for object names but not spatial location memory. It was concluded that spatial demands imposed by input device control should be minimized when training or testing spatial memory in VEs, and should be recognized as competing for cognitive capacity in spatial working memory.
Single linear virtual timelines have been used effectively with undergraduates and primary school children to convey the chronological ordering of historical items, improving on PowerPoint and ...paper/textual displays. In the present study, a virtual environment (VE) consisting of three parallel related timelines (world history and the histories of art and psychology) was used to convey both chronology and the cross-referencing and relatedness among the three domains of material. Undergraduate participants were able to use the VE more effectively than booklets, better remembering the chronological ordering of all materials and successfully cross-referencing from one domain to another. The paradigm arguably invokes the use of high capacity spatial memory, and could potentially be used to convey and remember large amounts of historical-chronological information.
► Placing historical information in a spatial-temporal virtual context enhances recall. ► Parallel virtual time lines allow successful recall of several domains of information. ► Use of a temporal-spatial protocol allows cross-referencing between domains.
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