The Establishment Of An Intrinsic Frame Of Reference Under Multi-cue Virtual Reality Conditions

In the study field of spatial memory, learning how to effectively remember the place of a building or the arrangement of some products is quite important for a person through spatial cogitation and the ability one possessed. The old studies deal with the spatial memory have already dug into the environmental factors and self-experience factors, but most of them use only two factors to study the interactions without further investing on three factors or more. The old studies show major three factors can contribute to the influence of the intrinsic frames of reference in spatial memory. They are the object orientation, the symmetrical scene and the extrinsic structure. Thus, this research will be focusing on these three factors in studying the interactions of them under different situation. And the research will use the technology of virtual reality to build the experiment scene and deliver it to the Participants. According to the theory of the intrinsic frames of reference which proposed by Mou et al, the experiment design is based on the set of the entire group of subjects, the experiment has set three conditions. In these conditions, the experiment scenes were made by 3Dmax and contain 7 objects and 7 characters. The arrangement of the objects or characters are the same as the experiment of McNamara(2009).Each of the experiments in the research contains one study stage and one test stage. The result of the study shows:1) When the axis of the symmetrical scene lays on 45 degree and the axis of the extrinsic structure lays on 0 degree, two contradictory factors cause the two group of participants act with no different in the test stage. By the analysis of simple effect and interaction, the participants show obvious view point effect and construct the whole experiment scene with the first impress of it.2) When the axis of the symmetrical scene and the axis of the extrinsic structure lay on the same 0 degree, two factors are identical. Both of the participants show better responses on the 0 degree than the 45 degree with no view point effect.3) When the experiment scene was added with an object orientation which the axis of it lays on the 0 degree with the extrinsic structure, while the axis of the symmetrical scene lays on the 45 degree, two groups of participants show faster responses on 0 degree in the test stage with on view point effect.Considering the results of three experiments in this study, the following conclusions can be drawn:First, when symmetrical scene and extrinsic structure are discrepancy, the structure of the experiment scene is not obvious so the participants simply build their memory by the first sight of the scene.Second, when symmetrical scene and extrinsic structure are coherent, the structure of the experiment scene is obvious and the participants follow the 0 degree advantage to build the intrinsic frames with on view point effect.Third, when the 0 degree with object orientation and extrinsic structure of the experimental scene contains more advantage than the 45 degree with symmetrical scene, two groups of participants all build their intrinsic frames on the 0 degree with no view point effect. Thus, the participants notice the advantage and focus on the obvious clue.This spatial cognition research provides new point considering the interaction of multi-factors, and the result of the research generate some guidance of the future study. This study also validates and develops the intrinsic model of spatial memory proposed by McNamara, Mou and Shelton.