Physical exploration of a virtual reality environment: Effects on spatiotemporal associative recognition of episodic memory

Associative memory has been increasingly investigated in immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, but conditions that enable physical exploration remain heavily under-investigated. To address this issue, we designed two museum rooms in VR throughout which participants could physically walk (i.e., high immersive and interactive fidelity). Participants were instructed to memorize all room details, which each contained nine paintings and two stone sculptures. On a subsequent old/new recognition task, we examined to what extent shared associated context (i.e., spatial boundaries, ordinal proximity) and physically travelled distance between paintings facilitated recognition of paintings from the museum rooms. Participants more often correctly recognized a sequentially probed old painting when the directly preceding painting was encoded within the same room or in a proximal position, relative to those encoded across rooms or in a distal position. A novel finding was that sequentially probed paintings from the same room were also recognized better when the physically travelled spatial or temporal distance between the probed paintings was shorter, as compared with longer distances. Taken together, our results in highly immersive VR support the notion that spatiotemporal context facilitates recognition of associated event content.