A new psychometric task measuring spatial perspective taking in ambulatory virtual reality

Abstract

Spatial perspective taking is an essential cognitive ability that enables people to imagine how an object or scene would appear from a perspective different from their current physical viewpoint. This process is fundamental for successful navigation, especially when people utilize navigational aids (e.g., maps) and the information provided is shown from a different perspective. Research on spatial perspective taking is primarily conducted using paper-pencil tasks or computerized figural tasks. However, in daily life, navigation takes place in a three-dimensional (3D) space and involves movement of human bodies through space, and people need to map the perspective indicated by a 2D, top down, external representation to their current 3D surroundings to guide their movements to goal locations. In this study, we developed an immersive viewpoint transformation task (iVTT) using ambulatory virtual reality (VR) technology. In the iVTT, people physically walked to a goal location in a virtual environment, using a first-person perspective, after viewing a map of the same environment from a top-down perspective. Comparing this task with a computerized version of a popular paper-and-pencil perspective taking task (SOT: Spatial Orientation Task), the results indicated that the SOT is highly correlated with angle production error but not distance error in the iVTT. Overall angular error in the iVTT was higher than in the SOT. People utilized intrinsic body axes (front/back axis or left/right axis) similarly in the SOT and the iVTT, although there were some minor differences. These results suggest that the SOT and the iVTT capture common variance and cognitive processes, but are also subject to unique sources of error caused by different cognitive processes. The iVTT provides a new immersive VR paradigm to study perspective taking ability in a space encompassing human bodies, and advances our understanding of perspective taking in the real world.