E: Cognitive maps in virtual environments: Facilitation of learning through the use of innate spatial abilities. ACM

{cjohns, edwin} @ cs.uct.ac.za It is often difficult for people, and particularly children, to learn relationships between data points (such as the relative sizes of the planets of the solar system). This sketch introduces a study aimed at investigating whether this type of data can be more easily learned by presenting it within a Virtual Environment, where the relationships between data points is represented by equivalent spatial relationships. By converting data relationships to spatial relationships, we are able to use our innate spatial abilities to understand and remember the data. The data is thus converted from an external form, to an internal representation that is always to hand and which is mentally easy to deal with