A Study of Spatial Cognition in an Immersive Virtual Audio Environment: Comparing Blind and Blindfolded Individuals
Author(s)
Afonso, Amandine
Blum, Alan
Jacquemin, Christian
Denis, Michel
Katz, Brian F. G.
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Abstract
This study presents the combined efforts of three research
groups toward the investigation of a cognitive issue through the
development and implementation of a general purpose VR
environment that incorporates a high quality virtual 3D audio
interface. The psychological aspects of the study concern
mechanisms involved in spatial cognition, in particular to
determine how a verbal description of an environment or the
active exploration of that environment affects the building of a
mental spatial representation. Another point is to investigate the
role of vision by observing whether or not participants without
vision (blind from birth, late blind or blindfolded sighted
individuals) can benefit from these two learning modalities.
This paper presents the preliminary results of this study.
Additionally is a description of the generic toolkit and
companion architecture that has been developed and used for
modeling the environment and interface in a cohesive manner.
Details for generating an immersive multimodal experimental
environment for this platform are also included.
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Date
2005-07
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Text
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Proceedings