Movement and Navigation in Virtual Reality (VR)

Participants solved a maze of rooms in VR while we tracked their head movements, eye movements, and scalp EEG activity. Within each room, their goal was to look for the two objects in each room so they could recognize them later on a memory test. Most rooms had one entrance and exit, but some rooms had multiple doors out, such that participants did not immediately know which path would lead to the end. There were a total of 4 unique mazes, and participants solved each maze twice in immediate succession (8 total maze "runs"). In the first run, each path had a separate color that was grayed out in the second run--this helped prevent participants from getting lost in the first run. This also allows us to examine the influence of experience on different outcomes.

Project 1: Coordination of eye, head, and teleport movements for visual search

Within each room, participants had to first look for then remember each of the two objects per room. Participants could make movements in 3 "scales": teleports and turns, head movements, and eye movements. Teleports and turns are large, discontinuous movements used for moving large distances or rotating a full 90 degrees. Head movements allow participants to actively explore the space in in front and around them. Eye movements allow participants to rapidly sample different parts of the space directly in front of them.

We are interested in how participants coordinate these three types of movements during visual search. Specifically, we want to understand how teleports, head movements, and eye movements are coordinated during the "exploration" phase when participants first enter a room and are looking around, as well as the "exploitation" phase when participants see the object and must commit it to memory. We also seek to characterize neural responses associated with movement and visual input in this setting, and understand how movement coordination and neural activity relates to memory performance.

Project 2: Spatial boundary crossings for context updating

As participants navigated the maze, most teleports kept them within a room; however, some teleports brought participants through a door into the next room. Further, most rooms were part of a single path, i.e., there was one door in and one door out; however, some rooms were decision points were multiple paths converged.

It is thought that memory and navigation is facilitated by the use of "boundaries" to separate continuous experience to discrete events. According to this theory, each of these movements represent different scales of spatial boundaries, i.e., teleports within-room vs between-room-within-path vs between-path. We are interested in understanding if evidence of crossing these spatial boundaries manifests in evoked and/or oscillatory neural activity and in eye movement behavior.