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Abstract:
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The retention and recognition of landmarks within large -scale spaces (buildings or cities ) plays an important role in way -finding and localization abilities . The current studies investigate our capacity for storing these views and the strategies used in deciding what information is stored and used . To investigate the issue of capacity we trained and tested subjects in six different environments with different levels of complexity . This manipulation was achieved by varying the number of states (position and orientations ) within the environment from 10 to 132 in which each state generated a unique view . This manipulation generated environments in which the information content varied from 3 bits to 7 .04 bits . We found no evidence of a capacity limitation for up to 7 bits of information . However , we did find that humans consistently lose about 1 .25 bits of information regardless of the size of the environment . This finding was consistent in both virtual realty and in real environment . We further studied the nature of the information loss . Can gaze patterns reveal what information is being lost during the encoding process ? |