Abstract
Investigating spatial navigation in virtual environments enables to study spatial learning with different sources of information. Therefore, we designed a large virtual city and investigated spatial knowledge acquisition after direct experience in the virtual environment and compared this with results after exploration with an interactive map (König et al., 2019). Our results suggest that survey knowledge measured in a straight line pointing task between houses resulted in better accuracy after direct experience in VR than tasks directly based on cardinal directions and relative orientations. In contrast, after map exploration, the opposite pattern evolved. Taken together, our results suggest that the source of spatial exploration influenced spatial knowledge acquisition.