Sarah H Creem-Regehr

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Psychology

Auditory landmarks can contribute to spatial updating during navigation with vision. Whereas large inter-individual differences have been identified in how navigators combine auditory and visual landmarks, it is still unclear under what circumstances audition is used. Further, whether or not individuals optimally combine auditory cues with visual c...

Everything in our environment moves through both space and time, and to effectively act we must be aware of both spatial and temporal elements in relation to our own bodies. Thus, perceptions of space and time have an intimate relationship. Walsh’s a theory of magnitude (ATOM) suggests that space and time perception rely on a general magnitude syst...

Auditory cues are integrated with vision and body-based self-motion cues for motion perception, balance, and gait, though limited research has evaluated their effectiveness for navigation. Here, we tested whether an auditory cue co-localized with a visual target could improve spatial updating in a virtual reality homing task. Participants navigated...

Older adults demonstrate impairments in navigation that cannot be explained by general cognitive and motor declines. Previous work has shown that older adults may combine sensory cues during navigation differently than younger adults, though this work has largely been done in dark environments where sensory integration may differ from full-cue envi...

Decades of research have shown that absolute egocentric distance is underestimated in virtual environments (VEs) when compared with the real world. This finding has implications on the use of VEs for applications that require an accurate sense of absolute scale. Fortunately, this underperception of scale can be attenuated by several factors, making...

New approaches to 3D vision are enabling new advances in artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, a better understanding of how animals navigate the 3D world, and new insights into human perception in virtual and augmented reality. Whilst traditional approaches to 3D vision in computer vision (SLAM: simultaneous localization and mapping), a...

Virtual Reality provides an opportunity to study spatial cue combination during navigation in controlled and ecologically valid environments. However, it is unknown how results compare to real world performance. We offer lessons learned and recommendations from a direct and conceptual set of replications of a spatial navigation homing paradigm acro...

Navigational tools are relied on to traverse unfamiliar grounds, but their use may come at a cost to situational awareness and spatial memory due to increased cognitive load. In order to test for a cost-benefit trade off in navigational cues, we implemented a variety of navigation cues known to facilitate target search and spatial knowledge acquisi...

Augmented Reality (AR) experiments are typically implemented in controlled conditions that are guided by experimenters. The paucity of research on remote AR experiments leads to difficulties for many researchers when conducting remote user studies. Our work provides a preliminary investigation of spatial perception in AR via mobile devices. The ini...

Navigation systems have become increasingly available and more complex over the past few decades as maps have changed from largely static visual and paper-based representations to interactive and multimodal computerized systems. In this introductory article to the Special Issue on Human-computer Interaction, Geographic Information, and Navigation,...

Everything in our environment moves through both space and time, and to effectively act we must be aware of both spatial and temporal elements in relation to our own body. Thus, perception of space and time have an intimate relationship. Walsh’s a theory of magnitude (ATOM) suggests that space and time perception rely on a general magnitude system...

People with visual impairment often rely on their residual vision when interacting with their spatial environments. The goal of visual accessibility is to design spaces that allow for safe travel for the large and growing population of people who have uncorrectable vision loss, enabling full participation in modern society. This paper defines the f...

Virtual objects in augmented reality (AR) often appear to float atop real world surfaces, which makes it difficult to determine where they are positioned in space. This is problematic as many applications for AR require accurate spatial perception. In the current study, we examine how the way we render cast shadows--which act as an important monocu...

Augmented reality ( AR ) is important for training complex tasks, such as navigation, assembly, and medical procedures. The effectiveness of such training may depend on accurate spatial localization of AR objects in the environment. This article presents two experiments that test egocentric distance perception in augmented reality within and at the...

Most people with low vision rely on their remaining functional vision for mobility. Our goal is to provide tools to help design architectural spaces in which safe and effective mobility is possible by those with low vision – spaces that we refer to as visually accessible. We describe an approach that starts with a 3D CAD model of a planned space an...

Individuals differ in preferences to use route versus survey strategies or distal versus proximal cues for navigation. The current study aimed to examine the effects of environmental structure experience in environment representations. Two groups of participants from Salt Lake City (Utah, USA) and Padua (Veneto, Italy) completed a series of navigat...

Measures of perceived affordances—judgments of action capabilities—are an objective way to assess whether users perceive mediated environments similarly to the real world. Previous studies suggest that judgments of stepping over a virtual gap using augmented reality (AR) are underestimated relative to judgments of real-world gaps, which are general...

The relative contribution of different sources of information for spatial updating – keeping track of one’s position in an environment – has been highly debated. Further, children and adults may differ in their reliance on visual versus body-based information for spatial updating. In two experiments, we tested children (age 10–12 years) and young a...

Successful performance on the water-level task, a common measure of spatial perception, requires adopting an environmental, rather than object-centered, spatial frame of reference. Use of this strategy has not been systematically studied in prepubertal children, a developmental period during which individual differences in spatial abilities start t...

Both visual and body-based (vestibular and proprioceptive) information contribute to spatial updating, or the way a navigator keeps track of self-position during movement. Research has tested the relative contributions of these sources of information and found mixed results, with some studies demonstrating the importance of body-based information,...

Spatial learning of real-world environments is impaired with severely restricted peripheral field of view (FOV). In prior research, the effects of restricted FOV on spatial learning have been studied using passive learning paradigms – learners walk along pre-defined paths and are told the location of targets to be remembered. Our research has shown...

ABSTRACT: Spatial updating is the ability to maintain knowledge of one’s spatial position in the environment and in humans, typically involves both visual and motor cues for self-motion. Previous research has shown developmental differences in sensorimotor dependency for spatial cognition. Some studies show greater visual dependency in children com...

In a series of experiments, we tested the hypothesis that severely degraded viewing conditions during locomotion distort the perception of distance traveled. Some research suggests that there is little-to-no systematic error in perceiving closer distances from a static viewpoint with severely degraded acuity and contrast sensitivity (which we will...

Affordances are possibilities for action that depend on both an observer's capabilities and the properties of the environment. Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) have been used to examine affordances in adults, demonstrating that judgments about action capabilities are made similarly to the real world. However, less is known about affordance jud...

Background: Previous research has found that spatial learning while navigating in novel spaces is impaired with extreme restricted peripheral field of view (FOV) (remaining FOV of 4°, but not of 10°) in an indoor environment with long hallways and mostly orthogonal turns. Here we tested effects of restricted peripheral field on a similar real-worl...

Given the widespread use of visualizations to communicate hazard risks, forecast visualizations must be as effective to interpret as possible. However, despite incorporating best practices, visualizations can influence viewer judgments in ways that the designers did not anticipate. Visualization designers should understand the full implications of...

The creation of realistic self-avatars that users identify with is important for many virtual reality applications. However, current approaches for creating biometrically plausible avatars that represent a particular individual require expertise and are time-consuming. We investigated the visual perception of an avatar’s body dimensions by asking m...

Ensemble displays are increasing in popularity, as emerging research demonstrates that ensemble displays can, in some contexts, effectively and intuitively communicate traditionally difficult statistical concepts to novice viewers, such as uncertainty.

Research has established that GPS use negatively affects environmental learning and navigation in laboratory studies. Furthermore, the ability to mentally rotate objects and imagine locations from other perspectives (both known as spatial transformations) is positively related to environmental learning. Using previously validated spatial transforma...

Given the widespread use of visualizations to communicate hazard risks, forecast visualizations must be as effective to interpret as possible. However, despite incorporating best practices, visualizations can influence viewer judgments in ways that the designers did not anticipate. Visualization designers should understand the full implications of...

Two of the primary reasons rainbow color maps are considered ineffective trace back to the idea that they implicitly discretize encoded data into hue‐based bands, yet no research addresses what this discretization looks like or how consistent it is across individuals. This paper presents an exploratory study designed to empirically investigate the...

Cognitive science has established widely used and validated procedures for evaluating working memory in numerous applied domains, but surprisingly few studies have employed these methodologies to assess claims about the impacts of visualizations on working memory. The lack of information visualization research that uses validated procedures for mea...

Research has established that GPS use negatively affects environmental learning and navigation in laboratory studies. Furthermore, the ability to mentally rotate objects and imagine locations from other perspectives (both known as spatial transformations) is positively related to environmental learning. Using previously validated spatial transforma...

Augmented reality (AR) technologies have the potential to provide individuals with unique training and visualizations, but the effectiveness of these applications may be influenced by users' perceptions of the distance to AR objects. Perceived distances to AR objects may be biased if these objects do not appear to make contact with the ground plane...

It is an open question as to whether people perceive and act in augmented reality environments in the same way that they do in real environments. The current work investigated participants' judgments of whether or not they could act on an obstacle portrayed with augmented reality. Specifically, we presented gaps of varying widths and depths to part...

Visualizations—visual representations of information, depicted in graphics—are studied by researchers in numerous ways, ranging from the study of the basic principles of creating visualizations, to the cognitive processes underlying their use, as well as how visualizations communicate complex information (such as in medical risk or spatial patterns...

The original article (Padilla et al., 2018) contained a formatting error in Table 2; this has now been corrected with the appropriate boxes marked clearly.

Past research shows consistent sex differences in survey-based spatial knowledge and wayfinding strategy. State anxiety may help to explain some of these differences. The current study tested if and how state anxiety influences sex differences in spatial learning during navigation. We used a virtual desktop spatial learning task and manipulated sta...

The utility of mediated environments increases when environmental scale (size and distance) is perceived accurately. We present the use of perceived affordances---judgments of action capabilities---as an objective way to assess space perception in an augmented reality (AR) environment. The current study extends the previous use of this methodology...

When humans and animals navigate through environments, they form spatial memories important for supporting subsequent recall of locations relative to their own position and orientation, as well as to other object locations in the environment. The goal of the current study was to examine whether individual differences in initial exploration of a lar...

Data Blitz presentation

Visualizing data has been touted as a method to reduce cognitive workload by externalizing cognitive processes and utilizing the human perceptual system's ability to recognize patterns [1-4]. The current study investigated whether displaying sociocultural data in an immersive 3D virtual environment improved insight generation and decision making ov...

As virtual reality expands in popularity, an increasingly diverse audience is gaining exposure to immersive virtual environments (IVEs). A significant body of research has demonstrated how perception and action work in such environments, but most of this work has been done studying adults. Less is known about how physical and cognitive development...

EFA and CFA as a first step for establishing construct validity for self report measures of navigation attitudes, as well as travel constraints and travel behaviors (mobility). We demonstrate that navigation ability is a separable dimension from wanderlust (enjoyment of navigation) and navigation anxiety (a hybrid of spatial anxiety and route follo...

Monitoring one’s safety during low vision navigation demands limited attentional resources which may impair spatial learning of the environment. In studies of younger adults, we have shown that these mobility monitoring demands can be alleviated, and spatial learning subsequently improved, via the presence of a physical guide during navigation. The...

Ensemble and summary displays are two widely used methods to represent visual-spatial uncertainty; however, there is disagreement about which is the most effective technique to communicate uncertainty to the general public. Visualization scientists create ensemble displays by plotting multiple data points on the same Cartesian coordinate plane. Des...

APA is celebrating 125 years this year and at the journal we are commemorating this milestone with a special issue. The inspiration came from our editorial team, who wished to acknowledge the links between game-changing articles that have influenced our research community in the past—we call them classics for short—and contemporary works. The main...

The expressiveness principle for visualization design asserts that a visualization should encode all of the available data, and only the available data, implying that continuous data types should be visualized with a continuous encoding channel. And yet, in many domains binning continuous data is not only pervasive, but it is accepted as standard p...

Recent work with simulated reductions in visual acuity and contrast sensitivity has found decrements in survey spatial learning as well as increased attentional demands when navigating, compared to performance with normal vision. Given these findings, and previous work showing that peripheral field loss has been associated with impaired mobility an...

Dataset for all experiments. (XLSX)

Description of variables in dataset. (TXT)

Data ensembles are often used to infer statistics to be used for a summary display of an uncertain prediction. In a spatial context, these summary displays have the drawback that when uncertainty is encoded via a spatial spread, display glyph area increases in size with prediction uncertainty. This increase can be easily confounded with an increase...

The Morris water maze is a spatial abilities test adapted from the animal spatial cognition literature and has been studied in the context of sex differences in humans. This is because its standard design, which manipulates proximal (close) and distal (far) cues, applies to human navigation. However, virtual Morris water mazes test navigation skill...

Abstract. Mental rotation refers to the imagined transformation performed when making comparisons between objects that are presented at different orientations. It is one of the most frequently used measures of small-scale spatial abilities and typically shows a male advantage in response time and accuracy. One possible factor underlying sex differe...

Ensembles are commonly used to generate visualizations that encode uncertainty such as hurricane weather forecast displays. How- ever, when presenting forecast visualizations to the general public, the preferred method for displaying forecast ensembles is to aggregate the ensemble members and generate summary displays. One prevalent sum- mary displ...

Decision-making using weather forecasts with uncertainty have vast consequences for health and safety. Yet, little is known about how the framing of forecasts with uncertainty affects decision-making. Researchers have used Prospect Theory to provide a framework for cognition of forecasts that include Bayesian probabilities. However, Bayesian probab...