EFFECTS OF CHARACTERISTICS OF THE OBSERVED AND THE OBSERVERS ON SPATIAL KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION

Abstract

Spatial knowledge plays crucial roles in our daily life as people instinctively use it in their daily activities. As such, existing research has been exploring how spatial knowledge acquisition is influenced by various characteristics of the observed and the observers. This dissertation tested the effects of two characteristics of the observed–virtual environment (VE) fidelity and spatial legibility, and two characteristics of the observers–gender and art education–on spatial knowledge acquisition. A total of 237 high school students were recruited for the tests that included a learning phase and a testing phase. In the learning phase, students were shown distinctive urban scenes. In the testing phase, students had to complete four spatial recall tasks concerning the urban scenes. The results showed that VE fidelity has varying effects on overall performance while spatial legibility, gender, and art education have statistically significant, insignificant, and insignificant effects on overall spatial performance.