Actual study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027716301500?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002771... Lo

Actual study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027716301500?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002771... Looks like they put people in two different types of VR environments. One was an open room ("vista space"), the other was more like a simple maze with a few corridors ("environmental space"). There were various objects throughout the environments that the subjects were asked to memorize and then "point" towards using a joystick. The subjects were allowed to learn the locations of the objects in various ways such as from a few vantage points, or moving around along various paths through the space, whether the objects appeared one at a time or all at once, etc. They then measured how long it took the subjects to complete the "pointing" (latency in seconds) and the error in direction (degrees). They predicted that in the open room condition, subjects would perform better when the object was 0, +/- 90, and 180 degrees relative to the body orientation, but for the corridor case performance should be best when the object was +/-45 or +/-135 degrees from the body orientation. I didn't figure out why they predicted this. They found that people in the "corridor" condition took longer to point at the object and made more errors, and this increased the more walls that were in between the subject and the item. They also found that the performance was largely as predicted according to the relative prediction of the object (better at +/- 45/135 in the corridor condition, and vice versa for the open room condition). They conclude: "memory differences between vista and environmental space originated mainly from the spatial compartmentalization which was unique to environmental space learning." Seems like a pretty flimsy connection between data and theory to me. If anyone can figure out why they made that prediction about body orientation please comment.