Exploring the Spatial Relationships Between Real and Virtual Experiences: What Transfers and What Doesn’t

Virtual environments are commonly used to assess spatial cognition in humans. For the past few decades, researchers have used virtual environments to investigate how people navigate, learn, and remember their surrounding environment. In combination with tools such as electroencephalogram, neuroimaging, and electrophysiology, these virtual environments have proven invaluable in their ability to help elucidate the underlying neural mechanisms of spatial learning and memory in humans. However, a critical assumption that is made whenever using virtual experiences is that the spatial abilities used in the navigation of these virtual environments accurately represents the spatial abilities used in the real-world. The aim of the current study is to investigate the spatial relationships between real and virtual environments to better understand how well the virtual experiences parallel the same experiences in the real-world. Here, we performed three independent experiments to examine whether spatial information about object location, environment layout, and navigation strategy transfers between parallel real-world and virtual-world experiences. We show that while general spatial information does transfer between real and virtual environments, there are several limitations of the virtual experience. Compared to the real-world, the use of information in the virtual-world is less flexible, especially when testing spatial memory from a novel location, and the way in which we navigate these experiences are different as the perceptual and proprioceptive feedback gained from the real-world experience can influence navigation strategy.