Archived Abstracts
Spatial working memory in immersive virtual reality foraging: path organization, traveling distance and search efficiency in humans (Homo sapiens)
Authors: Carlo De Lillo, Melissa Kirby & Frances C. James
Virtual Reality (VR) allows the development of spatial tasks that cannot be rigorously implemented in real-life environments with humans. This enables direct comparisons of the spatial behavior of human and non-human primates which are otherwise difficult to carry-out . In this study, humans explored immersive VR foraging environments similar to those used to study capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella) and other species. Three experiments were conducted. The results indicate that humans benefited from organized search patterns when monitoring their travel through either a “patchy” special arrangement or a matrix of locations in a similar way. Moreover, the use of VR allowed us to confirm experimentally that the recall of series of locations in humans is dependent on principles of organization that exploit the spatial constraints of the environment in order to minimize the memory demands of foraging. Finally, the manipulation of the size of the search space, which was possible in VR, confirmed that the relationship between search efficiency and search organization is not confounded by effects of traveling distance in humans. These results indicate that in humans, organizational factors may play a larger role than memory in their ability to forage efficiently. The comparison of our results with those of other species suggests that the dependency of search performance on organizational and strategic factors is particularly evident in humans.. This has important implications for the understanding of primate cognitive evolution.
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