The Effect of Instructions on Landmark, Route, and Directional Memory for Active vs. Passive Learners of a Virtual Reality Environment

• Author / Creator

  Parnes, Michael

• In two experiments, subjects either freely walked around a virtual building or watched a recording made made by a matched (free walk) subject. Subjects then performed several tasks: judgment of relative direction, scene recognition and navigation back to the start. The aim was to evaluate the the relative sensitivity of these measures, and to compare learning in active and passive learners under implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit (Experiment 2) learning instructions. Results demonstrated an advantage for active learners in the navigation back to start task and no difference in the judgment of relative direction task under both implicit and explicit conditions. In the recognition task, performance was above chance levels for all factorial cells. A gender moderated trend for an advantage for active learners was found only in implicit learning.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Implicit/explicit
  • Spatial cognition
  • Active/passive
  • Scene recognition
  • JRDs
  • Navigation

• Graduation date

  Fall 2012

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R32C9P

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.