Cognitive experiments using the web and virtual reality to study spatial navigation errors

Abstract

In the paper we describe two cognitive experiments performed using the web and virtual reality to study the alignment effect. In particular, we investigated if the presence of a landmark has any influence in reducing the errors due to maps being displayed in a misaligned orientation. We conducted two psychological experiments to ascertain the validity of this approach was. In our experiments, the participants were asked to memorize their starting position and a destination on a map, and then were asked to navigate themselves to their destination in a three-dimensional virtual-reality simulation of the map. During the memorization phase, the maps were displayed in different orientations with respect to the starting position of the participant and the destination. The results of these experiments show that the destination orientation and self-orientation has a much more pronounced effect.