Moderating the route angularity effect in a virtual environment: support for a dual memory representation

Research has shown that increasing the number of turns that a route takes through the environment increases estimates of distance--the route angularity effect. This study tested implications of different memory-based explanations of the route angularity effect within a virtual setting. Participants maneuvered through virtual pathways of varying length that included zero, two, or seven turns. After each set of three paths, they estimated relative path lengths on an analog scale. Results demonstrated that both increasing memory load during navigation and making retrieval more difficult by interpolating another spatial task prior to estimation significantly increased the magnitude of route angularity effects. These results are consistent with the idea that the number of turns is categorically encoded and used as a memory heuristic when fine-grained memory for the route distance is degraded either at encoding or prior to retrieval.