Individual Differences In Preferences For Spatial Reference Systems In Virtual Reality

Spatial reference frames play an important role in spatial navigation.Spatial reference frames are generally divided in two types: egocentric reference frame and allocentric reference frame.The egocentric reference frame encodes the spatial orientation based on the observer's own relative position to the object while the allocentric reference frame encodes the spatial orientation based on the relation between environment and their location.Gramann et al.(2005)discussed the frame reference of space navigation in virtual reality.Adopting the Point to Origin task,it was found that for the same video,different subjects showed two patterns: "turners" and "non-turners".Turners are those who seem to have accepted the new direction when turning and rotated their sagittal axis(egocentric)in their mind.Instead,non-turners didn't follow the new direction,they took the observer's own direction as the reference direction of the identification stage(allocentric).The purpose of experiment 1 is to verify whether the spatial reference preferences were similarly present in the Chinese population.Moreover,to explore the relationship between spatial capability and spatial reference preferences.The experiment uses the Star Tunnel task as the experimental material,and 100 college students were selectedas subjects.The results prove there indeed exist two kinds of reference frame preferences in the Chinese population.By selecting subjects with the high and low level of spatial ability according to the Santa Barbara Directional Questionnaire,we find that the choice of spatial reference frame preferences may be related to the spatial ability,those with higher ability are more likely to be turners;those with lower ability are more likely to be non-turners.The purpose of experiment 2 is to explore individual differences in spatially referenced preferences and to investigate whether gender and age development stages are related to spatially referenced preferences.A total of 278 subjects are selected from different age groups,including 154 junior high school students(76 boys and 78 girls)and 124 high school students(62 boys and 62 girls).The results prove that spatial reference preference is independent of gender,and there are differences in spatial preference frame at different age stages.The experiment 3 is to explore whether the spatial reference preference can influence spatial perspective-taking.A total of 231 subjects are selected(117 junior high school students and 114 high school students).Furthermore,we use the spatial perspective-taking of the left and right judgment task,the results prove that spatial perspective-taking ability is not affected by the spatial reference preference.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)The Chinese population also has spatial reference frame preferences in virtual reality task,and the preference may be related to the level of spatial capability: those with high spatial ability are more inclined to turners(egocentric);those with low spatial ability are more inclined to be non-turners(allocentric).(2)Spatial reference preferences in virtual reality task are not affected by gender.However,spatial reference frame preferences may have different characteristics with the development of age.(3)The spatial reference preference has nothing to do with the spatial perspective-taking,and the individual spatial perspective-taking ability does not affect the spatial reference preference.