Investigating aging effect on usage of geometry and feature in virtual reality environment
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Date
2020
Authors
Kimura, Kazushige
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Abstract
Aging changes our daily life; older people generally have difficulty in remembering and recalling information. Such decline usually includes re-orientation and spatial navigation skills as well. Recent development of virtual reality (VR) environments enables us to design navigational tasks to assess the plausible age-related changes. In this thesis, the use of geometrical and featural cues for navigation in a VR environment has been investigated through a series of experiments between young and older adults.
First, reorientation paradigm was employed to evaluate ecological validity of an immersive VR environment by comparing young participants’ choice of spatial cues between real and virtual environments. The findings suggest that although VR environments do not provide a spatial perception fully matched to the one in a real environment, while the VR environments are ecologically valid for such experiments. Second, an environment including a matrix of hallways was designed to investigate the use of geometry and featural cues among young and older adults in their navigational strategy. The results showed a general tendency of inconsistent navigation patterns among the older adults, namely when they were placed in a novel location and asked to find a target location that they were trained to navigate. Such inconsistency was not seen in young group. Third, a serious game, designed for iPads, was employed to assess the use of the spatial cues in a non-immersive VR setup. In particular, the feasibility of the game for training the utilization of geometrical cues was investigated. The difference between the young and old groups of participants was found not to be statistically significant in the first few sessions of the game. However, it was shown that the older group learned to use geometrical cues to navigate with less frequency of mistakes; this suggests it is possible to improve spatial cognition by a serious game design.
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Keywords
Virtual reality, Spatial cognition, Geometry, Feature, Aging
Citation
Kimura, K., Reichert, J. F., Olson, A., Pouya, O. R., Wang, X., Moussavi, Z., & Kelly, D. M. (2017). Orientation in virtual reality does not fully measure up to the real-world. Scientific reports, 7(1), 1-8.
Kimura, K., Reichert, J. F., Kelly, D. M., & Moussavi, Z. (2019). Older Adults Show Less Flexible Spatial Cue Use When Navigating in a Virtual Reality Environment Compared With Younger Adults. Neuroscience Insights.
Kimura, K., Reichert, J. F., Kelly, D. M., & Moussavi, Z. (2019). Older Adults Show Less Flexible Spatial Cue Use When Navigating in a Virtual Reality Environment Compared With Younger Adults. Neuroscience Insights.