Dissertation part 1: The Effects of Visual Realism on Object Location Memory and Exploration Patterns in Virtual Reality

Understanding environmental characteristics such as visual realism can inform human-centered design of VE. This research investigates the effects of visual realism on object location memory, a type of spatial memory in virtual reality. I was fully in charge of this project. Below shows a quick introduction to the paper. The full paper has been accepted to the conference paper track of VRST 2020.

Object location memory is an important form of spatial memory. Research from neuroscience proposed three processing stages in object location memory: (a) object processing, (b) spatial-location processing, and (c) object to location binding (Postma et al. 2008). It can be deducted that visual realism is mainly concerned with the first two mechanisms. In the object processing stage, the abstract-category which involves the left hemisphere and the specific-exemplar object recognition neural subsystems which involves the right hemisphere work together to recognize an object. The abstract-category system can categorize objects in the absence of visual details. The specific-exemplar system, on the other hand, preserves visual details of objects to distinguish specific exemplars (Marsolek, 1995, McMenamin et al. 2015). Our hypothesis is thus by increasing visual realism, the specific-exemplar object recognition enhances which results in better object location memory.