Comparison of Developmental Stages in Relation to Way Finding Behavior in an Immersive Virtual Reality Space

Hiroshi Watanabe,Eiji Wakamiya,Tomohito Okumura

doi:10.4236/health.2016.85052

Abstract

To establish a proper evaluation method for spatial cognitive deficits and a form of developmental disorder, we have used an immersive virtual reality (VR) device to develop a game that involves actually walking through a VR space to search for a target object. In this paper, we presented the results of control experiment with 22 healthy elementary school students as participants. The complexity of the VR space was controlled according to the number of pillars present and whether an overall view was possible (controlled by the height of the pillars). For each set of conditions, 24 trials were performed, and the route and time taken to search for the target were recorded. The starting point was changed in each subsequent trial. Results showed that the search time decreased as the number of trials increase, suggesting a process whereby a cognitive map was formed. We also compared the present results to results from our previous experiment with university students using the same experimental conditions, and we discussed the influence of developmental stage on spatial cognition.

Highlights

Research has been conducted to establish a proper evaluation method for spatial cognitive deficits and a form ofHow to cite this paper: Watanabe, H., Okumura, T. and Wakamiya, E. (2016) Comparison of Developmental Stages in Relation to Way Finding Behavior in an Immersive Virtual Reality Space
To quantitatively examine these kinds of clinical observations, we have used an immersive virtual reality (VR) device to develop a game that involves walking through a VR space to search for a target object, thereby enabling parameters such as search time and walking distance to be measured
Pretest Results and VR Space Way Finding Test Mean scores for Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices, and the Visual Discrimination and Visual Memory components of TVPS-3 were 32.14 (SD, 3.48), 10.50 (SD, 3.39) and 13.00 (SD, 2.09) respectively. Comparing these results to those of our earlier study (Watanabe et al, 2015) targeting healthy university students with the same stimulus as in this experiment, t-tests showed no significant differences in the measurements (Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices: F(1, 52) = 0.406, n.s.; TVPS-3 Visual Discrimination task: F(1, 52) = 1.320, n.s; TVPS-3 Visual Memory task: F(1,52) = 0.056, n.s)

Summary

Introduction

Research has been conducted to establish a proper evaluation method for spatial cognitive deficits and a form ofHow to cite this paper: Watanabe, H., Okumura, T. and Wakamiya, E. (2016) Comparison of Developmental Stages in Relation to Way Finding Behavior in an Immersive Virtual Reality Space. Cognitive phenomena in topographical disorientation include difficulty grasping the positional relationship between two separate locations, and forming a bird’s-eye cognitive map of an overall region based on the route taken To quantitatively examine these kinds of clinical observations, we have used an immersive virtual reality (VR) device to develop a game (hereinafter, VR test) that involves walking through a VR space to search for a target object, thereby enabling parameters such as search time and walking distance to be measured. This method is expected to be useful for elucidating the relationship between search behavior and a wide range of spatial factors, such as size of the space, presence or absence of landmarks, and position of the initial viewpoint, as well as the characteristics of the cognitive maps formed. We discuss trends in the search time required to find the target, and we compare the results with our previously reported results for healthy university students performing the same task [1]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion