Spatial Concepts: Sensitivity to Changes in Geometric Properties in Environmental and Figural Perception

This study examined spatial concepts in environment perception, by looking at people’s reaction to changes in shape, scale, orientation, and topology while navigating in a virtual environment, as contrasted to the case of figural perception. Although people attended to changes in shape, they were most sensitive to a topological relation and discriminated it qualitatively from other transformations. In environment perception, compared to figural perception, the property of similarity did not have great cognitive prominence. Mental-rotation ability affected spatial perception, with high-spatial people discriminating between different transformations more clearly and low-spatial people attending more to topological relations.

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