Presence and perceived body orientation affect the recall of out-of-sight places in an immersive sketching experiment

Abstract

The orientation of sketch maps of remote but familiar city squares produced from memory has been shown to depend on the distance and airline direction from the production site to the remembered square (position dependent recall, Rohrich, Hardiess, & Mallot, 2014). Here, we present a virtual reality version of the original experiment and additionaly study the role of body orientation. Three main points can be made: First, "immersive sketching" is a novel and useful paradigm in which subjects sketch maps live on paper while being immersed in virtual reality. Second, the original effect of position dependent recall was confirmed, indicating that the sense of presence generated in a virtual environment suffices to bias the imagery of distant places. Finally, the orientation of the produced sketch maps depended also on the body orientation of the subjects. At each production site, body orientation was controlled by varying the position of the life feed in the virtual environment such that subjects had to turn towards the prescribed direction. Position dependent recall is strongest if subjects are aligned with the airline direction to the target and virtually goes away if they turn in the opposite direction.