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Studies of the "testing effect" have shown that retrieval significantly improves learning. However, most of these studies have been restricted to simple types of declarative verbal knowledge. Five experiments were designed to explore whether testing improves acquisition of route knowledge, which has a procedural component consisting of actions to be performed at decision points (Golledge, 1991). Participants learned a route through a series of connected rooms in a virtual building. Each room contained multiple doors, only one of which led to the next room. During encoding, participants were shown the correct sequence of doors in a manner similar to global positioning system (GPS) navigation guidance. During subsequent exposures to the route, participants were either shown the correct sequence again or had to recall the sequence from memory. Participants later completed a final test in which they traversed the route without guidance or feedback. Testing improved route memory compared to studying, but only when participants were given feedback about the correct door prior to moving through the room. When feedback occurred after moving to an incorrect door, testing resulted in worse performance compared to studying. These findings parallel work on errorless learning, in which procedural skills are acquired more quickly when errors are minimized during learning.

Spatial memories are often organized around reference frames, and environmental shape provides a salient cue to reference frame selection. To date, however, the environmental cues responsible for influencing reference frame selection remain relatively unknown. To connect research on reference frame selection with that on orientation via environmental shape, we explored the extent to which geometric cues were incidentally encoded and represented in memory by evaluating their influence on reference frame selection. Using a virtual environment equipped with a head-mounted-display, we presented participants with to-be-remembered object arrays. We manipulated whether the experienced viewpoint was aligned or misaligned with global (i.e., the principal axis of space) or local (i.e., wall orientations) geometric cues. During subsequent judgments of relative direction (i.e., participants imagined standing at one object, facing a second object, and pointed toward a third object), we show that performance was best when imagining perspectives aligned with these geometric cues; moreover, global geometric cues were sufficient for reference frame selection, global and local geometric cues were capable of exerting differential influence on reference frame selection, and performance from experienced-imagined perspectives was equivalent to novel-imagined perspectives aligned with geometric cues. These results explicitly connect theory regarding spatial reference frame selection and spatial orientation via environmental shape and indicate that spatial memories are organized around fundamental geometric properties of space. (Contains 1 table and 7 figures.)

Virtual environments (VEs) can be infinitely large, but movement of the virtual reality (VR) user is constrained by the surrounding real environment. Teleporting has become a popular locomotion interface to allow complete exploration of the VE. To teleport, the user selects the intended position (and sometimes orientation) before being instantly transported to that location. However, locomotion interfaces such as teleporting can cause disorientation. This experiment explored whether practice and feedback when using the teleporting interface can reduce disorientation. VR headset owners participated remotely. On each trial of a triangle completion task, the participant traveled along two path legs through a VE before attempting to point to the path origin. Travel was completed with one of two teleporting interfaces that differed in the availability of rotational self-motion cues. Participants in the feedback condition received feedback about their pointing accuracy. For both teleporting interfaces tested, feedback caused significant improvement in pointing performance, and practice alone caused only marginal improvement. These results suggest that disorientation in VR can be reduced through feedback-based training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments investigated whether visual cues influence spatial reference frame selection for locations learned through touch. Participants experienced visual cues emphasizing specific environmental axes and later learned objects through touch. Visual cues were manipulated and haptic learning conditions were held constant. Imagined perspective taking when recalling touched objects was best from perspectives aligned with visually-defined axes, providing evidence for cross-sensory reference frame transfer. These findings advance spatial memory theory by demonstrating that multimodal spatial information can be integrated within a common spatial representation. (Contains 4 figures.)

Four experiments investigated the role of reference frames during the acquisition and development of spatial knowledge, when learning occurs incrementally across views. In two experiments, participants learned overlapping spatial layouts. Layout 1 was first studied in isolation, and Layout 2 was later studied in the presence of Layout 1. The Layout 1 learning view was manipulated, whereas the Layout 2 view was held constant. Manipulation of the Layout 1 view influenced the reference frame used to organize Layout 2, indicating that reference frames established during early environmental exposure provided a framework for organizing locations learned later. Further experiments demonstrated that reference frames established after learning served to reorganize an existing spatial memory. These results indicate that existing reference frames can structure the acquisition of new spatial memories and that new reference frames can reorganize existing spatial memories. (Contains 7 figures.)

Recent models in spatial cognition posit that distinct memory systems are responsible for maintaining transient and enduring spatial relations. The authors used perspective-taking performance to assess the presence of these enduring and transient spatial memories for locations encoded through verbal descriptions. Across 3 experiments, spatial reasoning about immediate and remote environments was influenced by enduring, allocentric spatial memories. In contrast, transient, egocentric spatial memories influenced participants' spatial reasoning about immediate, but not remote, environments unless participants received specific imagery instructions. These findings provide support for theories proposing multiple spatial memory systems. Furthermore, these findings closely replicate previous results from studies with purely visual scenes, thereby providing converging evidence for functional equivalence between spatial representations maintaining visual and described locations. (Contains 5 figures.)

The role of environmental geometry in maintaining spatial orientation was measured in immersive virtual reality using a spatial updating task (requiring maintenance of orientation during locomotion) within rooms varying in rotational symmetry (the number of room orientations providing the same perspective). Spatial updating was equally good in trapezoidal, rectangular and square rooms (one-fold, two-fold and four-fold rotationally symmetric, respectively) but worse in a circular room ([infinity]-fold rotationally symmetric). This contrasts with reorientation performance, which was incrementally impaired by increasing rotational symmetry. Spatial updating performance in a shape-changing room (containing visible corners and flat surfaces, but changing its shape over time) was no better than performance in a circular room, indicating that superior spatial updating performance in angular environments was due to remembered room shape, rather than improved self-motion perception in the presence of visible corners and flat surfaces. (Contains 4 figures.)

Four experiments investigated the conditions contributing to sensorimotor alignment effects (i.e., the advantage for spatial judgments from imagined perspectives aligned with the body). Through virtual reality technology, participants learned object locations around a room (learning room) and made spatial judgments from imagined perspectives aligned or misaligned with their actual facing direction. Sensorimotor alignment effects were found when testing occurred in the learning room but not after walking 3 m into a neighboring (novel) room. Sensorimotor alignment effects returned after returning to the learning room or after providing participants with egocentric imagery instructions in the novel room. Additionally, visual and spatial similarities between the test and learning environments were independently sufficient to cause sensorimotor alignment effects. Memory alignment effects, independent from sensorimotor alignment effects, occurred in all testing conditions. Results are interpreted in the context of two-system spatial memory theories positing separate representations to account for sensorimotor and memory alignment effects.