Formation of allocentric representations after exposure to a novel, naturalistic, city-like, virtual reality environment

During human spatial navigation, individuals transform visuospatial information between egocentric (i.e., first-person, viewer-dependent, body-centered) and allocentric (i.e., third-person, viewer-independent, world-centered) representations for optimal understanding of the surrounding environment. To capture reference frame utilization in a laboratory setting, researchers often utilize naturalistic, immersive, open-environment settings in virtual reality to mimic real-world navigation. However, few studies have paired navigation through these environments with robust, standardized, post-session testing of reference frame utilization. Therefore, this study developed a novel, immersive, city-like, naturalistic virtual reality environment (‘NavCity’), paired with an accompanying NavCity Allocentric Representation Assessment (NARA), to quantify naturalistic navigation ability and effects of repeated environmental exposure on the formation of allocentric reference frames within a singular experimental session. Notably, the NavCity task provides an open-source, standardized, editable, accessible, virtual reality paradigm for assessing naturalistic navigation ability, and the accompanying NARA serves to promote standardization of measures quantifying allocentric knowledge recall. Our central hypothesis is that we will observe within-session improvement in navigation performance after repeated NavCity exposure, which will scale with stronger recall of allocentric representations measured by NARA. Results support this hypothesis and show that within-session NavCity improvements are associated with the assessment of formed allocentric representations tied to the navigated environment. Importantly, this study addresses the need to standardize and methodologically measure transformations of first-person, egocentric navigation experiences to third-person, allocentric knowledge using an open-source, naturalistic tool. Immediate next steps are to characterize effects of aging on NavCity and NARA performance to provide understanding of aging-related deficits in allocentric reference frame utilization in older adults.