Effects of Social Skills on Spatial Perspective Taking

Spatial perspective taking is the ability to take the perspective of objects whereas social perspective taking is the ability to take the perspective of another person in a social situation. Past research has shown that better social skills have been corelated with having better spatial perspective taking abilities. However, other research on similar topics have revealed no such results and have provided evidence for the two abilities being separate. These research studies focused solely on a singular test to measure social skills which was the social and communication subscale of the Autism-Quotient. Therefore, we added two new tests as measures of social skills and combined them with the results from our spatial test. 33 participants complete the Spatial Orientation Test (SOT; Hegarty & Waller, 2004) which tested spatial perspective taking abilities and the social and communication subscales of the Autism-Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), the Perspective Taking Mindset Measure (Ragins & Ehrhardt, 2021), and the Social Perspective Propensity Scale (Gehlbach et al., 2008) which measured social skills. Our results revealed that there was no significant correlation between the results of the SOT and the social skills test, meaning that someone’s social skills were not related to their spatial perspective taking abilities. In conclusion, the addition of two new social skills test helped us provide further evidence that social skills and spatial perspective taking were not correlated

Memory for Object Location in Augmented Reality: The Role of Gender and the Relationship Among Spatial and Anxiety Outcomes

The potential of augmented reality (AR) technology for the study of spatial memory and orientation is a new research field. AR defines systems that attempt to enhance the user's experience with the physical world. In our app, we enhance the sense of sight by adding interactive 3D elements to the real environment. Our app can be used in any real environment so that the experimental conditions during the tasks and the way in which an individual navigates are similar to those used in real life. With AR, the experimenter has a high level of control of the task and can store the participant's responses accurately. The classical factors that influence an individual's performance on virtual spatial tasks are gender and cognitive factors. The influence of emotional factors on spatial performance has been studied more recently. Since AR tasks for the study of spatial memory and spatial orientation are new developments, little is known about the factors that are related to performance on tasks of this type. In our study, we tested 46 young adults (26 women) in an AR object-location task that was performed in a building. The participants had to memorize the position of eight virtual objects while they were walking through the environment. We also assessed the participants' performance on an object-recall task, a map-pointing task, and a paper-and-pencil spatial orientation task. The self-reported importance of different spatial strategies for wayfinding and the levels of trait anxiety and wayfinding anxiety were also evaluated. Our findings indicate that men performed better on the spatial paper-and-pencil test and spent more time completing the learning phase of the AR task. The spatial memory for the location of the objects in AR and on the map correlated positively. Anxiety was related to individual differences in the self-reported use of a spatial orientation strategy, but the association among them was weak. Trait anxiety was positively related to the time employed by the participants during the learning phase of the AR task, whereas wayfinding anxiety correlated negatively with the preference for an orientation strategy. Our results highlight the importance of anxiety in spatial orientation

NAVIGAZIONE IN UN AMBIENTE VIRTUALE: RUOLO DI ABILITÀ VISUOSPAZIALI, ANSIA SPAZIALE E STEREOTIPI DI GENERE IN FEMMINE E MASCHI

La navigazione nell’ambiente è un'abilità importante per la vita di tutti i giorni e viene definita come l'abilità di pianificare un percorso, muoversi nello spazio e raggiungere un luogo. Ogni individuo sviluppa una serie di competenze derivanti delle esperienze vissute durante il corso della vita; tali abilità definiscono le differenze individuali. In funzione dell’esperienza vissuta prendono forma alcune caratteristiche e peculiarità strettamente connesse ai fattori individuali e ai fattori ambientali ed esperienziali. La novità del progetto di ricerca, che verrà trattato ed esaminato all'interno della presente tesi, consiste nello studio delle differenze individuali utilizzando le diverse tipologie di conoscenza spaziale acquisite successivamente alla navigazione all’interno di un ambiente virtuale. Pertanto, l’indagine delle differenze individuali attraverso l’utilizzo di molteplici compiti di orientamento è parte dell’innovazione della ricerca che verrà esposta all'interno di questo elaborato

Age-related changes in memory for object locations across different perspectives.

One important aspect of spatial cognition is the ability to recognize and remember spatial locations across different viewpoints. Previous research has suggested that those abilities decline in older adults. The aim of the current PhD project is to develop a clearer understanding of what may be contributing to age-related declines in recognising object locations from different perspectives. Specifically, focusing on how ageing effects encoding strategies that are used to memorize spatial configurations and the precision with which object/landmark locations are remembered. In Chapter 2, gaze behaviour was recorded during a task in which young and older adults judged whether previously encoded objects have remained in the same position or were displaced following perspective shifts. Ageing was associated with declines in spatial processing abilities. Additionally, older adults displayed a more conservative decision style and relied more on encoding object positions using room-based cues compared to young adults, who focused on the spatial relations among the to-be remembered objects during encoding. In Chapter 3, age-related differences in encoding strategies were further investigated using a modified version of the task used in Chapter 2 in which the availability and utility of the room- based cues was manipulated. Performance accuracy was similar across both age groups, yet, older adults displayed a greater preference towards a more categorical encoding strategy in which they formed spatial relations between objects and room-based cues. In the remaining chapters the focus shifted to investigating the precision with which object locations are remembered across different perspectives. In Chapter 4 participants memorized the position of an object in a virtual room and then judged from a different perspective, whether the object has moved to the left or to the right. Results revealed that participants exhibited a systematic bias in their responses that was termed the reversed congruency effect. Specifically, participants performed worse when the camera and the object moved in the same direction than when they moved in opposite directions. In Experiment 2, it was shown that the presence of additional objects in the environment reduced the reversed congruency effect whilst in Experiment 3 the reversed congruency effect was greater in older adults, suggesting that the quality of spatial memory and perspective-taking abilities are critical in mediating the reversed congruency effect. In Chapter 5, a novel task was used to investigate the systematic bias reported in Chapter 4. In this task participants encoded the position of an object in a virtual room and then estimated the object’s position following a perspective shift. In addition, memory load was manipulated. Overall, participants systematically overestimated the position of the object in the direction of the perspective shift. This bias was present in both memory and perception conditions. In Chapter 6, these results were replicated in an online-based version of the study. Lastly in Chapter 7, the influence of camera translations and camera rotations on the perspective shift related bias was decoupled. Additionally, the study investigated whether adding more information into the scene would reduce the bias and if there are age-related differences in the precision of object location estimates and the tendency to display the bias related to perspective shift. Overall, camera translations led to a greater systematic bias than camera rotations. Furthermore, the use of additional spatial information improved the precision with which object locations were estimated and reduced the bias associated with camera translation. Finally, although older adults were as precise as younger participants when estimating object locations, they benefited less from additional spatial information and their responses were more biased in the direction of camera translations. Overall, by combining eye-tracking and diffusion modelling the current thesis shows that ageing is associated with changes in the type of information that is used to encode object locations across different perspectives. Additionally, ageing was found to be particularly associated with impairments in the formation of fine-grained spatial representations. Furthermore, a novel bias in spatial memory across different perspectives has been identified. It is proposed that the perspective shift related bias is driven by uncertainty about object position following a perspective shift that leads participants to rely on an egocentric anchor when estimating the location of an object