Two experiments investigated how people use buildings and street configurations to reorient in large-scale environments. In immersive virtual environments, participants learned objects' locations in an intersection consisting of 4 streets. The objects' locations were specified by 2 cues: a building and/or the street configuration. During the test,…

Compared to words that are new to a discourse, repeated words are produced with reduced acoustic prominence. Although these effects are often attributed to priming in the production system, the locus of the effect within the production system remains unresolved because, in natural speech, repetition often involves repetition of referents and…

We investigated how humans encode large-scale spatial environments using a virtual taxi game. We hypothesized that if 2 connected neighborhoods are explored jointly, people will form a single integrated spatial representation of the town. However, if the neighborhoods are first learned separately and later observed to be connected, people will…

In a virtual environment, blocking of spatial learning to locate an invisible target was found reciprocally between a distinctively shaped enclosure and a local landmark within its walls. The blocking effect was significantly stronger when the shape of the enclosure rather than the landmark served as the blocking cue. However, the extent to which…