By carefully manipulating virtual reality environments during learning, Aidan Horner and his team provide critical theoretical insight into how our spatial environment affects memory
Our spatial environment has a profound effect on our memory. We have all experienced walking into a room in our house and forgetting why we walked there in the first place. Moving around in space doesn’t just lead to forgetting, though; it can also boost memory. The ancient Greeks knew this, using the ‘memory palace’ technique of imagining moving through a series of rooms and placing items to remember in specific locations in a sequence. When they wanted to remember those items, they re-imagined walking through the rooms and seeing the items in the same sequence. To this day, memory champions use this mnemonic technique during competitions, for example, when memorising the order of packs of cards.
Why does our spatial environment affect memory, and in particular, why can it boost memory? One possibility is that it provides a spatial and temporal structure. The presence of clear boundaries (for example, doorways between rooms) and structure (for example, room A leads to B, not C) provides a scaffold for our memories, boosting long-term retention. Using virtual reality (VR) environments where participants navigate a series of rooms and learn a sequence of objects or words, we have previously shown that the presence of spatial boundaries modulates memory. We remember the sequence of objects better when the objects were seen in the same relative to adjoining rooms. More importantly, the presence of spatial boundaries boosts memory relative to environments with no spatial boundaries (for example, a long corridor with no doorways).
Despite this research, we still need a clear theoretical account of how spatial structure affects memory. Without this, we lack the ability to build spatial environments that would optimally boost memory. By combining VR environments and experimental psychology, we aim to understand how spatial structure affects memory. We will use this insight to build computational models that can predict which spatial environments will maximally boost memory, potentially at the level of the individual. We will then attempt to use this theoretical insight to amplify the learning of novel words in a new language, providing proof of principle that carefully constructing specific spatial environments to a given individual can aid language learning. While the use of spatial structure has been used for centuries to boost memory, we aim to provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the relationship between space and memory, enabling us to create spatial environments that maximise learning and memory.