Spatial navigation is a critical cognitive ability that ensures the effective functioning of individuals in their daily work and life. Early spatial navigation tests primarily relied on self-report questionnaires, which lacked objectivity and were prone to social desirability bias. Meanwhile, assessing spatial navigation in real-world environments requires large-scale settings, which are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and difficult to replicate. Such assessments are also susceptible to interference from noise, weather, and traffic, making them impractical for broader application. With the continuous advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology, its suitability for spatial navigation research has become increasingly evident. Compared to real-world testing, VR-based assessments are not constrained by physical space or time, offering greater efficiency, safety, and controllability. VR also allows for environmental design and manipulation, provides natural interaction and immediate feedback, and ensures both standardization and ecological validity. This review examines a series of issues related to the integration of virtual reality (VR) technology with the assessment of spatial navigation ability from a psychometric standpoint.
Firstly, it is essential to determine whether research findings obtained through VR can be generalized to the real world. Currently, this remains a complex and open question, particularly in the field of spatial navigation, where opinions are divided. Some supportive evidence suggests that spatial navigation performance in VR largely mirrors that in the real world, while other studies have identified discrepancies in perception and behavior between VR and real-world environments. At the perceptual level, differences exist in the sensory information available in VR compared to real-world settings, and individuals may exhibit biases in perceiving distance, size, and speed cues in VR. These variations in perceptual cues and processing modes may influence navigation performance. Given current technological limitations, the divergence between VR and reality is inevitable. However, it is worth noting that VR technology is advancing rapidly, and user familiarity with VR devices is steadily increasing, which may mitigate many of the issues identified in earlier studies. Therefore, researchers are advised to specify the hardware and software versions used in their studies and to remain attentive to technological advancements, periodically validating and updating their findings.
Simulation-based assessment aims to accurately and comprehensively evaluate target abilities by replicating real-world scenarios or tasks. For spatial navigation ability, the fidelity of an assessment tool is reflected in two key aspects: (1) visual presentation, primarily determined by display devices, and (2) interaction methods, particularly locomotion techniques that simulate real-world movement. Previous VR-based spatial navigation studies have employed diverse hardware configurations. While higher fidelity generally enhances immersion, engagement, and performance, test designers must also consider users' familiarity with the devices and their subjective experience. It is crucial to understand how different display devices and locomotion techniques influence performance and whether these effects vary across tasks.
VR technology significantly expands the range of assessment scenarios and interaction types, offering test designers considerable flexibility. However, it is equally important to ensure the scientific validity of assessment content, procedures, and formats. By synthesizing the design logic of previous spatial navigation tasks, this review concludes that, apart from specialized tasks measuring abilities like perspective-taking, most paradigms follow a two-phase structure: a learning phase followed by a testing phase, with common evaluation tasks targeting three types of spatial knowledge.
When designing VR-based scenarios and tasks, environmental factors that influence performance must be thoroughly considered. A key advantage of VR lies in its convenience to manipulate environmental variables. Test designers can adjust task difficulty by adding or simplifying environmental elements and modifying task rules. Environmental factors affecting spatial navigation can be broadly categorized into three groups: (1) task-related factors, (2) visual cue-related factors, and (3) spatial layout complexity-related factors.
As VR technology becomes increasingly integrated into spatial navigation research, more researchers are adopting VR to adapt classical assessment tasks or develop novel, ecologically valid spatial navigation tests. While this approach overcomes some limitations of traditional assessments, it has also raised concerns about the psychometric quality of such tools, which directly impacts the interpretation of research findings. As a novel assessment medium, VR differs substantially from traditional paper-and-pencil tests in interaction methods, data types, variable control, administration scale, user experience, and application scenarios. Given the complexity of VR-based assessments, developers and users should evaluate their quality across multiple dimensions.
The interaction between humans and VR is an interdisciplinary topic spanning psychology and artificial intelligence. As VR technology evolves at a rapid pace and user familiarity grows, numerous opportunities and challenges emerge. Future VR-based assessments may undergo technology-driven transformations, such as incorporating multimodal data to enable cross-validated, precise evaluations of spatial navigation ability. Researchers in related fields should prioritize the open-source availability of tools and data, allowing assessment instruments to be reused, adapted, and scrutinized by different research teams. Additionally, they should remain attuned to technological advancements, continuously validating and updating their findings accordingly.
