Acquisition of structural versus object landmark knowledge

Three experiments investigated the acquisition and retention of structural and object landmarks in virtual indoor environments. The experiments investigated the rate of acquisition and memory retention for hallway structure (structural landmarks) and pictures (object landmarks). The experiments investigated the rate of acquisition, the role of information content, and memory retention of this information when participants were trained and tested in novel virtual indoor environments. The results from these experiments suggest that (a) even initially, participants are biased toward encoding building structure over object landmarks; (b) participants are sensitive to the information content of landmarks and will allocate memory resources to landmarks that are more informative; and (c) information about these landmarks is retained even after a 1-year delay.