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Our first experiment is another box search task. It is the same task used in last year's experiment, where there are sixteen boxes in a room and eight are hidden targets (the rest are decoys). As soon as you find a hidden object, it will become another decoy. This requires you to remember where in the room you have already been. There are four states of movement as you go through the experiment:
1.TRANSLATION AND ROTATION: In this state, the wheelchair joystick controls exactly what you see and exactly how you move.
2. VISUAL ONLY: In this state, the wheelchair joystick controls exactly what you see but you do not move at all.
3. ROTATION ONLY: In this state, the wheelchair joystick controls exactly what you see but you only move rotationally.
4. PARTIAL TRANSLATION AND ROTATION: In this state, the wheelchair joystick controls exactly what you see, and you move exactly half of what you see.
You can read about the initial results from this experiment here.
This experiment is more directly about automatic spatial updating. There is both a virtual and physical set up of nine pillars, each with a familiar object: an alarm clock, a framed photo, a milk carton, a rubik's cube, a pikachu stuffed animal, a beer bottle, a stack of books, a soap dispenser, and a bowling pin. The participants will be asked to point at these objects with their eyes closed as they are rotated around the room. Sometimes they will be moved physically and sometimes they will only imagine they are moving. During the imagination states, we will also sometimes add mechanical clicks or jerks to help them trick themselves. This can help us measure how important real movement is for spatial updating.