The role of perspective in locating position in a real-world, unfamiliar environment

This paper reports an exploration of how perspective information contributes to localizing and orienting oneself in a real-world, unfamiliar environment. Participants were asked to recognize their positions on a three-dimensional map by observing real buildings from different perspectives set at viewpoints between 0degrees and 180degrees from a starting position. Results showed that participants were able to use remembered perspective information to locate their subsequent, different position in the correct area of space. They also showed a linear increase in rotation times as the angular distance increased between initially perceived perspective and test position. This finding suggests that the representation of the spatial information acquired from a real world large-scale environment is orientation dependent. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.