A Study of Spatial Cognition in an Immersive Virtual Audio Environment: Comparing Blind and Blindfolded Individuals

This study presents the combined efforts of three research groups toward the investigation of a cognitive issue through the development and implementation of a general purpose VR environment that incorporates a high quality virtual 3D audio interface. The psychological aspects of the study concern mechanisms involved in spatial cognition, in particular to determine how a verbal description of an environment or the active exploration of that environment affects the building of a mental spatial representation. Another point is to investigate the role of vision by observing whether or not participants without vision (blind from birth, late blind or blindfolded sighted individuals) can benefit from these two learning modalities. This paper presents the preliminary results of this study. Additionally is a description of the generic toolkit and companion architecture that has been developed and used for modeling the environment and interface in a cohesive manner. Details for generating an immersive multimodal experimental environment for this platform are also included.