Generalizing perception-action coupling depends on context: Spatial updating is nonobligatory in virtual but not...

People learn perception-action coupling through repeated interactions with environments. With extensive practice, perception-action coupling becomes automatic, and instructions that contradict such coupling are often ignored, suggesting that the coupling becomes obligatory. One theoretical question is how perception-action coupling in learning contexts generalizes to other contexts. Spatial updating, the process by which people revise their spatial relationship to objects during locomotion, is considered both automatic and obligatory in physical environments, making it ideal for studying coupling generalization. This study examined whether spatial updating remains obligatory in immersive virtual and mixed-reality environments. Participants learned an object array from one orientation and performed judgments of relative direction from two imagined and two actual headings, same as or opposite to the learning heading. Spatial updating was indexed by superior pointing performance when imagined and actual headings were aligned rather than when they were misaligned, an aligned-imagined effect. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants learned virtual objects in immersive virtual environments, with the virtual room either removed or retained during testing. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants learned a mixed layout of real and virtual objects. In Experiment 5, participants learned real objects in a physical environment. Despite instructions to suppress spatial updating, sensorimotor alignment effects appeared in Experiments 3, 4, and 5, but not in Experiments 1 and 2. These findings suggest that spatial updating is not obligatory in immersive virtual environments but remains obligatory in mixed-reality and physical environments. More broadly, obligatory coupling may become less obligatory in transfer contexts, depending on context similarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).