Cognition Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Cognition, including details on psychology, neuroscience, memory, brain theory.

Distance cognition in virtual environmental space: further investigations to clarify the route-angularity effect.

Jansen-Osmann P, Wiedenbauer G

Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-University, Universitätsstrasse 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany. petra.jansen-osmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

Two experiments with 72 participants in total investigated the route-angularity effect. This effect is shown when a greater number of turns along a route increase the estimated length of this route. In this study it was shown that the route-angularity effect is likely to be a memory-based effect depending on task difficulty. The important factor seems to be how heavily memory is loaded during learning. The route-angularity effect even appears in intentional learning, when memory is loaded heavily. Under this learning condition participants know beforehand that they have to estimate distances. All experiments were conducted in a controlled virtual environment, which allows a reliable investigation of distance estimations in environmental space.

Published 6 January 2006 in Psychol Res, 70(1): 43-51.
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