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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMemory & cognition Vol. 37; no. 4; pp. 514 - 521
Main Authors Hutcheson, Adam T., Wedell, Douglas H.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer-Verlag 01.06.2009
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Attention
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognitive Psychology
Concept Formation
Distance Perception
Estimates
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Hypotheses
Judgment
Learning. Memory
Male
Memory
Mental Recall
Optical Illusions
Orientation
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychomotor Performance
Retention (Psychology)
Social Environment
Studies
User-Computer Interface
Memory Demand
Virtual Environment
Mental Rotation
Concurrent Task
Delay Type
Human
Navigation
Memory
Virtual reality
Cognition
Space perception
Experimental study
Distance
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Summary: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.
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ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/MC.37.4.514