A novel virtual-reality-based route-learning test suite: Assessing the effects of cognitive aging on navigation

Abstract

Most research groups studying human navigational behavior with virtual environment (VE) technology develop their own tasks and protocols. This makes it difficult to compare results between groups and to create normative data sets for any specific navigational task. Such norms, however, are prerequisites for the use of navigation assessments as diagnostic tools-for example, to support the early and differential diagnosis of atypical aging. Here we start addressing these problems by presenting and evaluating a new navigation test suite that we make freely available to other researchers (https://osf.io/mx52y/). Specifically, we designed three navigational tasks, which are adaptations of earlier published tasks used to study the effects of typical and atypical aging on navigation: a route-repetition task that can be solved using egocentric navigation strategies, and route-retracing and directional-approach tasks that both require allocentric spatial processing. Despite introducing a number of changes to the original tasks to make them look more realistic and ecologically valid, and therefore easy to explain to people unfamiliar with a VE or who have cognitive impairments, we replicated the findings from the original studies. Specifically, we found general agerelated declines in navigation performance and additional specific difficulties in tasks that required allocentric processes. These findings demonstrate that our new tasks have task demands similar to those of the original tasks, and are thus suited to be used more widely. Keywords Navigation. Route learning. Navigation test. Cognitive aging Spatial navigation is a fundamental cognitive ability that is important for mobility and independence. However, a growing number of experimental studies have demonstrated agerelated declines in a variety of orientation and navigational tasks, including route learning and repetition (

Spatial navigation: Cognitive variables involved in route retracing among an elderly population

“…Moreover, according to the multivariate analysis, the second variable predicting performance on route retracing (after route repetition) was the pointing task, which evaluated the knowledge of the environment's configuration, independent of the subject's point of view (allocentric). These results support the hypothesis that the realisation of route retracing involves an allocentric representation (Wiener et al, 2012(Wiener et al, , 2019Zancada-Menendez et al, 2016) based on survey knowledge (van Asselen, Kessels, et al, 2006) that allows the integration of two different perspectives (forward-backward).…”

“…performing this task. Furthermore, to our knowledge, the few studies that have focused on route retracing in the elderly (Allison & Head, 2017;Barrash, 1994;Karimpur et al, 2016;Wiener et al, 2012Wiener et al, , 2019;…”

Extended Reality in Spatial Sciences: A Review of Research Challenges and Future Directions

“…In the XR discourse, human factors research is commonly conducted at the intersection of HCI and cognitive science domains (e.g., [13,29,46,58,98,[135][136][137]). HCI researchers try to improve technology and design by understanding humans better [46,97,138], whereas cognitive science researchers utilize technology to understand humans better [139,140]. At the intersection of these two domains, several HCI questions connected to perceptual and cognitive processing of visuospatial information arise, including:…”

Landmarks: A solution for spatial navigation and memory experiments in virtual reality

“…The navigational test suite (Wiener et al, 2019) was developed in Unity and is delivered as a stand-alone application for Windows platforms, named Intersections. While the standalone application does not support VR, the Unity package in which it was developed is openly available from the Open Science framework (https://osf.io/u7yrh/), and thus could presumably be modified to support immersive VR or XR.…”

“…The navigational test suite provides users with the option of collecting data from three tasks: original, route repetition, and route retracing (for descriptions of each, see Wiener et al, 2019). All three tasks take place in a four-way intersection that serves as the virtual environment.…”