Brain may not need body movements to learn virtual spaces

Among the lab’s interests are the technology’s potential for socially beneficial uses, such as training first responders, medical professionals and those who must navigate hazardous environments. For those types of applications to be most effective, though, we need to better understand how people learn in virtual environments.

In a new study published, Ekstrom and co-author Derek Huffman, a post-doctoral researcher in the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, advance that understanding by looking at whether or not being able to physically move through virtual spaces improves how we learn them. “One of the big concerns or drawbacks with virtual reality is that it fails to capture the experience that we actually have when we navigate in the real world,” said Ekstrom, an associate professor of psychology and the study’s senior author. “That’s what we were trying to address in this study: What information is sufficient for forming spatial representations that are useful in actually knowing where things are?”

The researchers had study participants explore three virtual cities while wearing virtual reality headsets. The participants navigated each city in one of three ways:

• 参与者在全向上行走的时候穿着耳机，或者在360度，跑步机上行走，允许用户在任何方向上自由行走。在这种情况下，参与者可以通过行走和转动头部来浏览虚拟环境。
• 参与者只使用虚拟环境导航，只使用手持式操纵杆;他们无法通过移动他们的头部或走路来导航。
• Participants navigated by moving their bodies side to side and moving a joystick back and forth; they were not able to walk around.

与会者平均地花了两到三个小时，探索虚拟城市并找到某些商店，他们被指示找到。一旦他们有机会了解环境，他们被问到一系列问题来测试他们的空间记忆。例如，他们可能会被要求想象他们站在咖啡店，面向书店。然后将被要求指向杂货店的方向。

The accuracy of participants’ responses did not vary based on which condition they were in. Participants then underwent an MRI scan while answering a similar set of questions. This allowed the researchers to see what was happening in the brain as participants retrieved spatial memories.

研究人员发现，在所有三种情况下都会激活大脑的相同区域。此外，在三种条件下，大脑的不同区域之间的相互作用模式类似。“我们发现的是，在不同的条件下，神经电图是相同的，”Ekstrom表示。“这表明 - 就大脑而言以及我们也能够用行为衡量的东西 - 只需看到虚拟环境中的东西就足够了信息。一旦你知道环境足够了解环境，你就可以从你的身体移动，并没有真正增加那么多。“

调查结果解决了周围的长期科学辩论，无论身体运动是否有助于学习物理空间。“There’s been this idea that how you learn might make a huge difference, and that if you don’t have body-based cues, then you’re lacking a big part of what might be important for forming memories of space,” said Huffman, the study’s first author. “Our research would suggest that once you have a well-formed memory of an environment, it doesn’t matter as much how you learned it.”

“We would say you don’t need body immersion, and you don’t need body cues to form complex spatial representations,” Ekstom added. “That can happen with sufficient exposure in simple virtual reality applications.”

从实际的角度来看，该研究表明，即使是基本的虚拟现实系统也可能在教学应用中有用。“虚拟现实有可能让我们了解我们可能无法直接经验的情况，”Ekstrom表示。“例如，如果我们能够在建筑物攻击后能够训练第一名响应者可以找到人们，那么如果在建筑物上攻击，那就呢？我们的研究结果表明，使用虚拟现实 - 即使是简单的应用程序，甚至是您只是移动操纵杆 - 教人们对空间环境的相当复杂的了解。“