Embodied Space in Natural and Virtual Environments: Rethinking Spatial Cognition

Understanding the Embodied Approach

Cognitive neuroscience is increasingly leveraging virtual environments to study spatial cognition. While virtual reality (VR) offers immersive opportunities for exploring space during neuroimaging, this shift raises a crucial question: can we truly equate spatial cognition in virtual settings with that in the physical world?

Francesca Morganti proposes that our understanding of space must include an embodied perspective—where perception and action are not isolated processes, but rather function together through sensorimotor coupling. This enactive view suggests our bodily experience and environment jointly shape how we perceive, act, and make meaning.

Core Takeaways from Embodied Spatial Cognition

• Perception-action unity: Movement and perception work in tandem, driven by affordances—opportunities for action based on environmental cues.
• Egocentric and allocentric mapping: Spatial knowledge combines body-centered (egocentric) navigation with external, map-based (allocentric) representations.
• Sensorimotor schemes: We rely on learned feedback loops between bodily movement and environmental response to navigate spaces meaningfully.

Navigating Virtual vs. Physical Environments

Virtual simulations often serve as proxies for real-world tasks in cognitive testing. However, this research shows significant performance differences between navigating on paper maps (allocentric) versus navigating in VR (egocentric). For instance, in a study comparing the Money’s Road Map Test (M-RMT) and a virtual version (VR-RMT), subjects performed better in the traditional map version, particularly as they aged.

Why the gap? VR demands more complex sensorimotor adjustments and greater cognitive effort to align the user’s expectations with the visual feedback provided by the simulation. Misalignment in VR may cause disorientation, especially when turn errors cascade and affect ongoing spatial understanding.

Implications for Cognitive Research

• Usability matters: Poorly designed VR tools can overload cognition, especially in older or cognitively impaired populations. Without good interface design, VR risks misrepresenting spatial abilities.
• Perspective switching is harder in VR: Imagining spatial turns (as in paper tasks) often requires less effort than physically navigating them in a simulated space.
• Embodied offloading in VR is incomplete: While users can offload spatial information into the environment during VR tasks, this offloading lacks the full-body interaction of real-world movement—leading to potential meaning breakdowns.

Moving Forward: The Role of Enactivism

Adopting an enactive lens means seeing cognition as emerging from dynamic interactions between the body and the world. Virtual reality isn't just a technical tool; it's a new domain that challenges how we define and measure cognitive functions.

To make the most of VR in neuroscience, tools must be adapted not only to simulate reality but to support meaningful, embodied interaction. Systems should allow users to build spatial understanding from ongoing action—mirroring the way cognition develops naturally through lived experience.

Source:

Morganti, F. (2016). Embodied Space in Natural and Virtual Environments: Implications for Cognitive Neuroscience Research. In Pervasive Computing Paradigms for Mental Health (MindCare 2015), Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 604. Springer. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300076927