Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gillner, S.
• Mallot, H.A.

Titel

Virtual Reality and Spatial Cognition

Ist Teil von

• International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2001, Vol.24, p.16211-16214

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2001

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Virtual reality is a technology that makes use of computer generated interactive graphics which give the user the sensation of being in a virtual, that is, computer-generated world. The article presents the main applications of virtual reality, with a focus on behavioral experiments. The very first application of virtual reality was the training of army pilots in flight simulators. Today, virtual reality is a standard method for manipulating the action—perception—cycle underlying normal behavior in all autonomous agents. One mainstream of experiments has focused on the question of the comparability of the results obtained in the virtual world with results obtained in the real world. The lack of proprioception and vestibular stimuli lead in some studies to different results. Another direction is the combination of virtual reality experiments with functional imaging studies (PET or fMRI). Results show that human subjects revealed an excitation especially in the hippocampus. This has long been known for rats, which show an activation of so-called place cells in the hippocampus. One problem in conjunction with virtual reality is the simulation sickness which might be caused by the conflicting information of different sensory inputs, that is of the visual input and the vestibular input.