Gender differences in wayfinding in virtual environments with global or local landmarks

Experiment 


The virtual maze environment was implemented with a custom software system that displayed 3D environments and allowed users to navigate using a first-person view. The field-of-view (FOV) of the
VE was approximately 37 degrees (which is almost the human's scope of vision) . The participants used four arrow keys on  keyboard to move forward, backward, left, and
right inside the maze.
The layout of the maze included a 5 5 grid of interweaving roads and cubic blocks surrounded by walls (Fig. 1a).

Fig. 1. (a) A bird’s eye view of the simple maze structure adopted in the current study; (b) First-person view of the global-landmark condition; (c) First-person view of the locallandmar condition.

Two environments with different types of landmarks were created:

global (Fig.1b) and local (Fig.1c) landmarks which would lead to differential performance,
* global landmarks, has eleven enormous structures (for example, a tower, lighthouse, water tower, windmill,
and other buildings), which participants could see from everywhere inside the maze, and they were placed outside the surrounding walls. 
* local landmarks, eleven different cartoon
pictures (an axe, banana, bell, bird,bow, radish, deer, fish, desk lamp,scissors, and umbrella) were placed on the sides of the cubic blocks inside the maze. Each one will appear on only one side of
a given cube. 

Four targets an airplane, bicycle, grape, and penguin were under the global landmark condition; and a candle, duck, flag, and kettle under the local landmark condition) were placed at different locations under each type of landmark condition. 



All participants were tested in both global and local landmark mazes: half of the participants were first tested with global landmarks, whereas the other half were first tested with local landmarks. Before the formal experiment started, the participants were briefed about the procedure and stimulus configuration, and they practiced using the arrow keys for controlling movement in the VE for approximately 5 min.


Result:
Generally, males tended to engage in a more exploratory mode of way-finding  which led to quicker moves but not necessarily to optimal routes. 
By contrast, females adopted a more conservative strategy by making more stops to change their viewing orientation, which led to slower moves but not fewer detours. These gender differences were most obvious for VEs with local landmarks, most likely due to the different strategies adopted during way-finding  males learned the map from a configural perspective, whereas females focused on local features (Coluccia et al., 2007).

Source:  Chin-Ten Lin et al ,(2012). Gender differences in wayfinding in virtual environments with global or local landmarks:Journal of Environmental Psychology. Pp:89e96

~Research Method~