Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Virtual Reality https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-021-00597-0 S.I. : VIRTUAL REALITY FOR THERAPY, PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTIONS, AND PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE REHABILITATION Soundspace VR: spatial navigation using sound in virtual reality L. Fialho 1  · J. Oliveira 1,2  · A. Filipe 1  · F. Luz 1,2 Received: 28 June 2020 / Accepted: 15 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract Prior research reveals that spatial navigation skills rely mostly in visual sensory abilities, but the study of how spatial pro- cessing operates in the absence of visual information is still incomplete. Therefore, a spatial navigation task in virtual reality using auditory cues was developed to study navigational strategies in blindfolded sighted individuals. Twenty healthy adult participants were recruited. The task consisted of a VR scene, in which participants were asked to localize a sound source and move to the target without visual information throughout the entire task. Task difculty was manipulated by route length and complexity in three diferent difculty levels repeated in two diferent trials. The frst trial (learning) consisted of moving to the sound source and then returning to the starting point. The second trial (retrieval) consisted of the same task without the sound source but with auditory cues from obstacles to test spatial learning. Performance was assessed from behavioral measures of execution time, obstacle collisions, and prompts during the task execution. These variables were compared to established neuropsychological instruments for global cognition (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) and memory abilities (Wechsler Memory Scale-R). The results suggested that difculty level afected navigation performance in both trials. Navigation performance was better in the retrieval trial, but both learning and retrieval trials were explained by global cognitive functioning. These data suggested the Soundspace VR as being efective to study spatial navigation in the absence of visual information and highlight the importance of auditory information from spatial sound cues for spatial navigation and spatial learning. Keywords Virtual reality · Spatial memory · Spatial navigation · Sound cues 1 Introduction Spatial navigation is one important function in daily life. Spatial navigation skills are dependent of brain development that is an important asset for animal survival through support of complex foraging behaviors (Haun et al. 2006). Spatial navigation comprises a set of complex skills that involve cognitive functions as memory, visual and spatial percep- tion, and executive functions (Koenig et al. 2011). Spatial navigation of known places is based in spatial representations created from spatial memory that are used for instance to return to rewarding locations (home, hunting grounds, etc.), present in a wide range of animals: goldfsh (e.g., Vargas and Lopez 2005), rodents (e.g., Morris et al. 1986), dogs (e.g., Dumas 1998), and humans (e.g., Allen 1999). Spatial memory needs constant updating as some spa- tial features of the environment change rapidly, requiring updated information from the location of objects for guid- ing mobility (Haun et al. 2006). The functional neuroanat- omy of spatial memory includes various structures in the brain, where both hippocampal and parahipocampal regions assume critical roles in encoding and retrieval of spatial information (Schinazi et al. 2016). The hippocampus is thus involved in tasks that depend on relating or combining infor- mation from diferent sources for creating cognitive maps about the environment allowing individuals to plan shortcuts or novel routes for known environments (Eichenbaum 2017). In the study of spatial navigation, there is a trade-of between the naturalness of the environment with experimen- tal control in such experiments (Dolins et al. 2014). The * J. Oliveira jorge.oliveira@ulusofona.pt 1 Lusófona University, Campo Grande, 376, 1749-024 Lisboa, Portugal 2 HEI-Lab, Lisbon, Portugal