Navigating with peripheral field loss in a museum: learning impairments due to environmental complexity

Abstract

BackgroundPrevious research has found that spatial learning while navigating in novel spaces is impaired with extreme restricted peripheral field of view (FOV) (remaining FOV of 4°, but not of 10°) in an indoor environment with long hallways and mostly orthogonal turns. Here we tested effects of restricted peripheral field on a similar real-world spatial learning task in an art museum, a more challenging environment for navigation because of valuable obstacles and unpredictable paths, in which participants were guided along paths through the museum and learned the locations of pieces of art. At the end of each path, participants pointed to the remembered landmarks. Throughout the spatial learning task, participants completed a concurrent auditory reaction time task to measure cognitive load.ResultsUnlike the previous study in a typical hallway environment, spatial learning was impaired with a simulated 10° FOV compared to a wider 60° FOV, as indicated by greater average pointing error with restricted FOV. Reaction time to the secondary task also revealed slower responses, suggesting increased attentional demands.ConclusionsWe suggest that the presence of a spatial learning deficit in the current experiment with this level of FOV restriction is due to the complex and unpredictable paths traveled in the museum environment. Our results also convey the importance of the study of low-vision spatial cognition in irregularly structured environments that are representative of many real-world settings, which may increase the difficulty of spatial learning while navigating.

How can basic research on spatial cognition enhance the visual accessibility of architecture for people with low vision?

“…Recent studies with restricted FOV during spatial learning have tested the impact of active navigation and active search (e.g., looking for named targets at uncertain locations) for targets (Barhorst-Cates et al 2020) and environmental complexity (Barhorst-Cates et al 2019). In a comparison of walking and wheelchair locomotion with 10° FOV, spatial memory performance was similar, suggesting that proprioceptive feedback from walking itself does not aid spatial learning (see also Legge et al 2016a).…”

Does active learning benefit spatial memory during navigation with restricted peripheral field?

“…The participant carried the mouse in his or her dominant hand. We used this measure as an index of cognitive load, which we have done in several prior studies (Barhorst-Cates et al, 2016;Barhorst-Cates et al, 2019;Rand et al, 2015). A slower RT indicates greater cognitive load (Verwey & Veltman, 1996).…”

A systematic review of extended reality (XR) for understanding and augmenting vision loss

“…Simulations are a valuable experimental tool for studying performance in tasks such as visual search ( Addleman, Legge, & Jiang, 2021 ; Jones et al., 2020 ), face perception ( Liu & Kwon, 2016 ; Tsank & Eckstein, 2017 ), reading ( Huang et al., 2019 ; Latham et al., 2011 ), and navigation ( Barhorst-Cates, Rand, & Creem-Regehr, 2019 ; Freedman, Achtemeier, Baek, & Legge, 2019 ; Zult et al., 2019 ). A prime example of this is OpenVisSim ( Jones et al., 2020 ), which can track eye movements and simulate different gaze-contingent impairments in real time ( Figure 4 ).…”