“Where Did I Put That?” – Effectiveness of Kinesthetic Memory in Immersive Virtual Environments

Abstract

Kinesthetic memory is an essential factor in human interaction with the outside world. It helps adept keyboard users to type rapidly and hit the keys without having to look at them. It enables musicians to play their instruments without consciously having to think about the necessary movements. And it can help people to find things again, based on the location where they put them. The benefits of kinesthetic memory in the physical world are well known and well used for training or in physical therapy. Yet little effort has been made to examine the effects of kinesthetic memory in a virtual environment. In our paper, we present a user study designed to explore the intensity of kinesthetic memory while interacting with a large screen immersive environment. This could be used to improve the usability and effectiveness of user interfaces for such environments.

Does (multi-)touch aid users' spatial memory and navigation in 'panning' and in 'zooming & panning' UIs?

“…More recent research on spatial and content memory completely removed user input from the study and focused solely on the effect of visual grids [15]. Ebert et al explored the combination of spatial and kinesthetic memory in front of a wall-sized 3D vision display with real depth perception [6]. Users performed a memory task in a 3D scene with mouse vs. physical navigation, i.e., walking in front of the screen.…”

Physical and Cognitive Effects of Virtual Reality Integrated Training

“…Kinesthetic memory refers to the extent that the human body can recall its movements and postures. Through the use of sensory-motor learning and development of kinesthetic memory, a person can accomplish specific physical movements without thinking about how his or her body's parts should move (Ebert, Deller, Steffen, & Heintz, 2009). Interviews with 16 professional welders and welding engineers revealed that they felt that sensory-motor learning was a very important component of successful welding.…”

Empirical evidence, evaluation criteria and challenges for the effectiveness of virtual and mixed reality tools for training operators of car service maintenance

“…Moreover, at least two other additional criteria for measuring the improved abilities of the trainees were proposed in literature of VR/MR studies for training. The first one is the measurement of trainees' ability to recall the acquired skills and actions for a correct performance, such as, the economy of movements, and the accuracy of posture and actions measured in terms of time and accuracy within the training sessions [33,43,62,63]. The second criterion is the skill-decay [64][65][66][67].…”