A specific
field of cognitive psychology is spatial memory, that is the ways in which an
individual acquires and represents the relationships between himself/herself
and his/her external environment. One area of research in this field concerns
the analysis of environmental and individual characteristics and the influence
they have in determining the mental representation of the surrounding space.
This area
of research has now received new impetus thanks to the introduction of
techniques such as virtual reality, which makes it possible by controlling the
physical characteristics of the environment and so studying, in a more
systematic way, how people move within it.
The
laboratory's research activity fits into this context, since immersive virtual
environments are used to study the sense of orientation and the characteristics
of spatial memory.
The areas
of investigation of the Virtual Reality Laboratory are multiple and aimed at
analysing the following aspects:
- the
characteristics of spatial memory acquired after acquiring environment by
exploring it from the computer desktop or in an immersive virtual reality
situation or by actually moving in the environment;
- personality
traits or specific psychological disorder can be associated with different spatial
strategies to successfully move through the environment;
- which
spatial reference structures are used when indicating an object in relation to
us (i.e. person-object localisation) or when indicating an object in relation
to another object (i.e. object-object localisation). In particular, we are
interested in detecting whether people use the same spatial reference systems
in the two different types of localisation or whether they use different
reference systems;
- the
environmental characteristics that favour the perception of an emotionally
pleasant environment in which to move, referring both to the general structure
of the environment (e.g. city vs. natural environment) and to specific
environmental characteristics such as landmarks
- whether
the features people use to navigate the Web are related to real-world
'navigation' strategies
- which
environmental characteristics favour the long-term recall of an environment
(environmental episodic memory)
The members
of the Lab have developed independent research interests and combined them with
the main theme of the workshop. To find out more about the other topics click
on and individual profiles.