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Abstract

This study examines how spatial memory acquired from navigation is used to perform a survey task involving pointing. Participants learned a route through a virtual city by
walking it multiple times in one direction on an omnidirectional
treadmill. After learning, they were teleported to several
locations along the route, self-localized and pointed to
multiple other locations along the route. Pointing was done
away from or towards the current location. Preliminary data
show that participants were faster in pointing away. This suggests
that pointing was based on an incremental process rather
than an all-at-once process which is consistent with mentally
walking through a cognitive map or constructing a mental
model of currently non-visible areas of the city. On average
participants pointed faster to targets located further down the
route towards the end than to targets located route upwards
towards the start. Analysis of individual performance showed
that more participants than expected by chance showed such
an effect of target direction also in their pointing accuracy.
The direction of this effect differed between participants.
These direction biases suggest that at least some participants
encoded the environmental space by multiple interconnected
locations and used this representation also for pointing.