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Abstract

The initial experience of a new environment naturally follows a successively encounter of environmental features, such as landmarks. This learning experience is reflected in organization of memory as indicated by the Route Direction Effect. This effect says that, when primed by an object which was learned in route direction preceding the target, one can recognize the target faster compared to being primed by an object originally experienced after passing the target. All previous studies showing this effect used pictures of target objects presented on computer displays. We wanted to examine if the effect can still be found with a more immersed scenario in a virtual reality presenting spatial context during testing. Participants learned a route by physically walking through a virtual "Museum of the Future" with one picture in each corridor which they saw through a head mounted display. Afterwards, participants were teleported into a corridor experienced before or into a corridor with a distractor picture. They were then asked to indicate whether they had seen the corridor with its picture before. These targets were previously primed by stimuli (i.e., corridors with museum pictures or distractors) from different locations of the environment. Results show a general priming effect, in which previously learned primes lead to a faster reaction to a learned target, compared to distractor primes. The results also show a directional effect, yet an inverted one compared to the original Route Direction Effect: targets primed with an object that was originally experienced directly before the target (neighboring predecessor) were more slowly reacted to, compared to targets primed with a neighboring successor object or a more distant object. Additionally, this inverted Route Direction Effect only develops over time. We speculate that these puzzling results might originate from a spread of reaction inhibition through a spatial network when providing spatial context to self-localize within an environment.