Tasks
Here I've included information on the interactive spatial tasks I have developed or helped develop. These pages include supplemental, technical, and reference information for these tasks. If you are interested in using any of these tasks in your research please feel free to contact me.
The Spatial Configuration Task
The Spatial Configuration Task was developed in 2013 by us at NeuroLab.ca, intended as a replacement for the traditional tasks (like the Cognitive Map Task) used to measure the ability to generate a mental representation of the environment. The spatial configuration task was designed to be quick to administer and feature a randomizeable environment, so the task can be re-taken if necessary and new environments can be generated instantaneously.
The Four Mountains Task
The GettingLost.ca Four Mountains Task was designed to roughly replicate "The Four Mountains Test" originally developed by Dr. Tom Hartley. This task requires participants to quickly study a simple landscape, and after a momentary delay, select a landscape with the same topography from a set of four landscapes. This task ostensibly places demands on an individual's short-term and/or working memory, as well as their perspective taking and scene-processing faculties.
The Path & Location Integration Tasks
The Path Integration and Location Integration Tasks were based off the real-world task used by Jan Wiener and colleagues (2011). These tasks are designed to assess the ability to integrate optic flow into a coherent sense of movement, and update and store that representation for future use. This task solely relies on processing visual information and does not explicity assess the capacity to perform inertially-based or idiothetic path integration (i.e. using kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and vestibular information) although the degree to which human path integration is dependant on information from any given sensory modality is not clear.
The Mental Rotation Task
The Mental Rotation Task is an implementation of the classic Shepard and Metzler -style mental rotation task, designed to assess the capacity to perform mental manipulations of simple three-dimensional objects. This task presents pairs of objects in which some are composed of two of the same objects, and others are composed of two objects that are mirror-images of one another; in either case presented at varying degrees of rotational disparity from eachother. Participants are tasked with identifying if the pair is constituted by a mirror-image or true pair, and ostensibly requires them to attempt to 'unrotate' the pair prior to classifying them.
The Cognitive Map Task
The Cognitive Map Task is a modernized version of the Cognitive Map Test developed by Dr. Giuseppe Iaria. This task requires participants to memorize and report the locations of a handful of unique landmarks in a small city-like virtual environment. This task is more ecologically valid than the relatively abstracted Spatial Configuration Task, but we believe both load on similar cognitive processes. The Cognitive Map Task is slightly easier than the Spatial Configuration Task, and best used in applications where the Spatial Configuration Task would be expected to be insensitive to variability.