The contributions of self-motion cues and room shape during navigation through virtual environments

Spatial updating, the process of updating one's perceived orientation and location during movement, is critical to many spatial behaviors relevant to navigation. This experiment investigated the relative influences of two types of cues during spatial updating: self-motion cues and environmental shape cues. Self-motion cues by themselves are noisy and often result in cumulative spatial updating errors, and room shape cues by themselves are often ambiguous (e.g., a square room that is geometrically equivalent from four perspectives).