Visual illusion in virtual world alters women’s target-directed walking

In this study we investigated whether a visual illusion located in far space alters a person’s open-loop, target-directed walking path in the same manner as it alters the perception of the target’s position. Through the use of immersive VR the subject was able to walk physically to the location of a target embedded in a scene that was manipulated to create a visual illusion, known as the induced Roelofs effect. This illusion has been shown to alter the perception of a target’s position. The experiment consisted of two tasks: a perception task and an action task. In the perception task, subjects viewed the scene for 1 s, it disappeared, and they were to report the target’s location verbally. The results showed that the visual illusion altered the reported positions in all but one subject. In the action task, subjects viewed the scene for 1 s, it disappeared, and the subjects were asked to walk to the target’s location. The results showed that the illusion significantly altered the walking paths of most of the women and less than half of the men. A significant gender effect was observed; women’s walking paths deviated, on average, by 7.1° and men’s, by only 2.0°. These results indicate that action tasks in far space are susceptible to the effects of visual illusions, unlike the action tasks in near space that reportedly have been resistant to them. Furthermore, the significant gender effect suggests that men and women either have different strategies and/or employ different mechanisms when executing a visually guided task in far space.