Virtual Reality as a Valuable Research Tool for Investigating Different Aspects of Spatial Cognition

The interdisciplinary research field of spatial cognition has benefited greatly from the use of advanced Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. Such tools have provided the ability to explicitly control specific experimental conditions, manipulate variables not possible in the real world, and provide a convincing, multimodal experience. Here we will first describe several of the VR facilities at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biological Cybernetics that have been developed to optimize scientific investigations related to multi-modal self-motion perception and spatial cognition. Subsequently, we will present some recent empirical work contributing to these research areas