From maps to navigation: the role of cues in finding locations in a virtual environment

In two experiments, participants navigated through a large arena within a virtual environment (VE) to a location encoded in memory from a map. In both experiments, participants recalled locations by navigating through the VE, but in Experiment 2, they additionally recalled the locations on the original map. Two cues were located outside and above the walls of the arena at either north-south locations or east-west locations. The pattern of angular bias was used to infer how the cues affected the creation of spatial categories influencing memory for location in the two tasks. When participants navigated to remembered locations in the VE, two cue-based spatial categories were inferred, with cues serving to demarcate the boundaries of the categories. When participants remembered locations on the original map, two cue-based categories were again formed, but with cues serving as category prototypes. The pattern of results implies that cue-based spatial categorization schemes may be formulated differently at the memory retrieval stage depending on task constraints.