Embodied Space in Natural and Virtual Environments: Implications for Cognitive Neuroscience Research

In the last decades, virtual reality environments are largely used in
cognitive neuroscience research in order to provide participants with the possibility
to navigate a space while brain activity is scanned through neuroimaging
techniques such as MRI and similar. Accordingly in the field of spatial cognition
research, several publications strongly assume the equivalence between exploring
a not simulated and a computer-simulated environment. Albeit considering, since
its first introduction in cognitive research, virtual reality simulation as an interesting
possibility to study spatial knowledge organization, in the present paper I
would like to address an “unrevealed question”: is it reasonable to obtain the same
conclusions about spatial cognition from classical neuropsychological tests and
virtual reality simulations? Or are there any differences for spatial knowledge
acquisition provided from the simulations’ characteristics that we have to strongly
consider? The main aim of this contribution is to find a possible answer to this
question by introducing an embodied cognition approach to the study of
wayfinding.