Biology subjects

König, S. U.

Publications and source records attributed to König, S. U..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Gaze Graphs in spatial navigation: visual behavior during free exploration explains individual differences in navigation performance

Vision is an important sense for spatial navigation, yet little is known about the role of visual behavior during spatial knowledge acquisition and its link to spatial navigation performance. In this study, participants freely explored the immersive virtual reality city of Westbrook while eye-tracking data were collected. Subsequently, participants spatial knowledge was tested in an immersive pointing-to-building task. To address the freedom of movement during the spatial exploration, we transformed the eye-tracking data into gaze graphs and applied a graph-theoretical analysis. We assessed gaze graph architecture and identified gaze-graph-defined landmarks, finding that their properties were consistent with key results from our earlier work. Furthermore, we investigated which factors contribute to the observed individual differences in spatial navigation performance. We found that global gaze graph measures, specifically gaze graph diameter, could explain 40% of the observed individual differences in participants mean task performance. In comparison, a model based on participants responses to a self-report questionnaire was not predictive of such differences. Consequently, we suggest that visual behavior, as reflected in global gaze graph measures, is a strong predictor of individual performance differences. Our results not only contribute to a better understanding of landmarks and individual differences in spatial navigation but also outline the potential of vision and gaze-graph-based spatial navigation research.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Beyond the first glance: How human presence enhances visual entropy and promotes spatial learning

Spatial learning emerges not only from static environmental cues but also from the social and semantic context embedded in our surroundings. This study investigates how human agents influence visual exploration and spatial knowledge acquisition in a controlled Virtual Reality (VR) environment, focusing on the role of contextual congruency. Participants freely explored a 1 km2 virtual city while their eye movements were recorded. Agents were visually identical across conditions but placed in locations that were either congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to the surrounding environment. Using Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we found that incongruent agents elicited longer fixations and significantly higher gaze transition entropy (GTE), a measure of scanning variability. Crucially, GTE emerged as the strongest predictor of spatial recall accuracy. These findings suggest that human-contextual incongruence promotes more flexible and distributed visual exploration, thereby enhancing spatial learning. By showing that human agents shape not only where we look but how we explore and encode space, this study contributes to a growing understanding of how social meaning guides attention and supports navigation. Author summaryWhen people explore a new environment, such as an unfamiliar city, they rely on what they see to understand and remember the space. Traditionally, research has focused on stable features like buildings or landmarks. However, real-world environments also include people, whose presence can shape how we explore and learn. In this study, participants explored a virtual city while their eye movements were tracked. Some human figures matched their surroundings, while others appeared out of place. We found that people looked longer at those unexpected figures and that their gaze patterns became more flexible and varied afterward. This broader visual exploration helped them remember the layout of the city more accurately. Our results suggest that human presence, especially when it disrupts expectations, can promote more effective learning by encouraging more complex visual engagement. These findings can provide insight into how strategically placed social cues enhance attention and memory, and more importantly, how they influence our patterns of visual exploration.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Finding landmarks - An investigation of viewing behavior during spatial navigation in VR using a graph-theoretical analysis approach

Vision provides the most important sensory information for spatial navigation. Recent technical advances allow new options to conduct more naturalistic experiments in virtual reality (VR) while additionally gather data of the viewing behavior with eye tracking investigations. Here, we propose a method that allows one to quantify characteristics of visual behavior by using graph-theoretical measures to abstract eye tracking data recorded in a 3D virtual urban environment. The analysis is based on eye tracking data of 20 participants, who freely explored the virtual city Seahaven for 90 minutes with an immersive VR headset with an inbuild eye tracker. To extract what participants looked at, we defined "gaze" events, from which we created gaze graphs. On these, we applied graph-theoretical measures to reveal the underlying structure of visual attention. Applying graph partitioning, we found that our virtual environment could be treated as one coherent city. To investigate the importance of houses in the city, we applied the node degree centrality measure. Our results revealed that 10 houses had a node degree that exceeded consistently two-sigma distance from the mean node degree of all other houses. The importance of these houses was supported by the hierarchy index, which showed a clear hierarchical structure of the gaze graphs. As these high node degree houses fulfilled several characteristics of landmarks, we named them "gaze-graph-defined landmarks". Applying the rich club coefficient, we found that these gaze-graph-defined landmarks were preferentially connected to each other and that participants spend the majority of their experiment time in areas where at least two of those houses were visible. Our findings do not only provide new experimental evidence for the development of spatial knowledge, but also establish a new methodology to identify and assess the function of landmarks in spatial navigation based on eye tracking data. Author SummaryThe ability to navigate and orient ourselves in an unknown environment is important in everyday life. To better understand how we are able to learn about a new environment, it is important to study our behavior during the process of spatial navigation. New technical advances allow us to conduct studies in naturalistic virtual environments with participants wearing immersive VR-headsets. In addition, we can use eye trackers to observe the participants eye movements. This is interesting, because observing eye movements allows us to observe visual attention and, therefore, important cognitive processes. However, it can be difficult to analyze eye tracking data that was measured in a VR environment, as there is no established algorithm yet. Therefore, we propose a new method to analyze such eye tracking data. In addition, our method allows us to transform the eye tracking data into graphs which we can use to find new patterns in behavior that were not accessible before. Using this methodology, we found that participants who spend 90 min exploring a new virtual town, viewed some houses preferentially and we call them gaze-graph-defined landmarks. Our further analysis reveals also new characteristics of those houses that were not yet associated with landmarks.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Embodied Spatial Knowledge Acquisition in Immersive Virtual Reality: Comparison of Direct Experience and Map Exploration

Investigating spatial learning in virtual environments allows studying different sources of information under controlled conditions. We built a virtual environment in the style of a European village and investigated spatial knowledge acquisition by experience in the virtual environment and by the use of an interactive map. We tested knowledge of cardinal directions, building-to-building orientation, and judgment of direction between buildings. We find that judgment of directions was more accurate after virtual reality exploration than after map exploration, and the opposite results were observed for knowledge of cardinal directions and relative orientation between buildings. Further, the alignment effect was confined to the map exploration condition. Taken together, our results suggest that the source of spatial exploration differentially influenced spatial knowledge acquisition.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Learning of Spatial Properties of a Large-scale Virtual City with an Interactive Map

On the basis of embodied/-enacted theories of the mind, investigations of spatial cognition related to real world environments have become current research interests. How this perspective relates to acquiring spatial knowledge not by active exploration, but through map learning, however, remains unresolved. Therefore, we designed a large virtual city comprised of over 200 houses, suitable for active exploration or spatial learning based on a map. Here, we report our results after single and repeated 30-minute training sessions using an interactive city map. We tested subjects knowledge of the orientation of houses towards cardinal north and of two houses relative to each other and the locations of two houses towards each other in a pointing task. Our results revealed that a single training session was sufficient to repeatedly view the majority of houses covering a large area of the city. However, repeated training sessions were necessary to improve the performance level and reveal significant differences between tasks. In contrast to a previous study in a real world city, performance in the two orientation tasks was better than in the pointing task. The lack of distance and the lack of angular difference effects onto task performance suggest the use of a global reference frame. Performance was positively correlated with a self-report on spatial abilities (FRS) in the absolute orientation and pointing task but not the relative orientation task. Overall, our results suggest that training with an interactive city map enhances abstract knowledge, not directly available from an embodied perspective.

neuroscience↗