Staff and students are invited to attend Althea Ambosta’s MA Oral Thesis Proposal scheduled for:

Date and time: Monday, July 9th, 2012 at 2:00 pm 

Location: P412, Duff Roblin Building

Committee members:

Dr. Debbie Kelly, Advisor - Psychology
Dr. Jonathan Marotta - Psychology
Dr. Tony Szturm - Medical Rehabilitation 

Title:  Encoding Geometry from Partial Viewpoints of a Virtual 3D Environment

Abstract:
When disoriented, two types of visual cues can be used to reorient: featural cues (the colour, pattern or texture of objects or surfaces) and geometric cues (the distance, direction or angular information between objects or surfaces). All species studied to date demonstrate an ability to use geometric cues to reorient (Cheng & Newcombe, 2005); however this has only been examined using locomotor tasks or paradigms exposing individuals to elevated viewpoints of the whole environment. The purpose of this research is to investigate whether geometry can be extracted from partial viewpoints of an environment. During Experiment 1, participants will either be exposed to partial viewpoints (3 of 4 corners) or full viewpoints (4 corners) of a virtual parallelogram-shaped environment. Participants will be trained to select one of the corners in this environment and can use wall length, corner angles and featural cues to reorient. Testing without featural cues in transformed environments will allow for the examination of geometric encoding using wall length cues alone, angular cues alone, as well as the weighting of these cues when they provide conflicting information. During Experiment 2, I will further examine the encoding of geometry from partial viewpoints by varying the number of featural cues that can be seen at a given time (2 features versus 1 feature) and varying the distance between cues (proximal versus distal). Overall, the results will identify whether wall length and angular information can be extracted from a limited number of cues, and if the distance between cues influences one’s accuracy while reorienting.

** a copy of the thesis is available from Gloria.Derksen@ad.umanitoba.ca