PhD: State-Dependent Spatial Representations using immersive Virtual Reality

Descrizione

PhD: State-Dependent Spatial Representations using immersive Virtual Reality Sintesi in italiano (traduzione automatica): L'organizzazione offre un'opportunità di dottorato per un ricercatore interessato a come le persone comprendono e navigano in ambienti spaziali complessi, utilizzando la realtà virtuale. Il progetto si svolgerà presso il Laboratorio di Scienze Geo-informatiche e Telerilevamento, sotto la supervisione del Dr. Jiayan Zhao e dei Professori Arnold Bregt e Sytze de Bruin. I candidati devono possedere una laurea magistrale in scienze cognitive, psicologia ambientale, interazione uomo-computer, scienze geo-informatiche o un campo correlato, con esperienza nella ricerca sperimentale in realtà virtuale. Le mansioni principali includono lo sviluppo di compiti sperimentali basati su VR per studiare come le persone apprendono e aggiornano le rappresentazioni spaziali in ambienti dipendenti dallo stato. Il progetto mira a contribuire a nuovi concetti e metodi per lo studio della cognizione spaziale come processo dinamico e adattivo. Are you fascinated by how people understand, navigate, and communicate complex spatial environments? Do you hold a master’s degree in cognitive science, environmental psychology, human-computer interaction, geo-information science, or a related field, with experience in experimental research using virtual reality? If so, we have an exciting PhD opportunity for you! Spatial thinking plays a crucial role in understanding and communicating environmental issues, from climate adaptation and landscape planning to biodiversity loss, water management, and sustainable land use. These challenges often require people to reason about spatial processes that are not immediately visible: future scenarios, delayed consequences, cascading effects, or changes that unfold across places and time. To support better environmental decision-making and communication, we need to understand how people build mental representations of such complex, dynamic spatial systems. Spatial cognition research has traditionally studied how people represent environments through concepts such as mental models, cognitive maps, and cognitive graphs. These approaches have provided important insights into how people perceive locations, learn route layouts, and understand spatial relations. However, they are primarily suited to stable environments and are less equipped to handle situations where the same place or action may have different spatial meaning or outcomes depending on context — for example, a landscape that changes with climate, or a local action that produces effects in another part of the system. This PhD project investigates how people learn, update, and use spatial knowledge when the structure or meaning of an environment depends on hidden or changing conditions, which we refer to as state-dependent environments. Rather than treating spatial knowledge as a static map, the project asks how people construct and reason with representations that capture not only where things are, but also the conditions under which spatial relations hold, and how immersive virtual reality and behavioural data such as movement, interaction, and eye-tracking can be used to study this process. Specific research objectives Develop VR-based experimental tasks to study how people learn and update spatial representations during active exploration in different types of state-dependent environments. Identify behavioural patterns of state-dependent spatial reasoning that reveal how people detect, anticipate, and adapt to the intertwined relations between spatial structure and its underlying conditions. Establish the conditions under which state-dependent spatial representations generalise beyond the learned environment, and what individual and contextual factors predict successful knowledge transfer across virtual-virtual and/or virtual-real contexts. The outcome will contribute to new concepts and methods for studying spatial cognition as a dynamic, predictive, and adaptive process, with broader relevance to environmental communication, systems thinking, and adaptive decision making. You will work here The research is embedded within the chair Laboratory for Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing (GRS) which is led by Prof. Sytze de Bruin . You will be supervised by Dr. Jiayan Zhao , and co-supervised by Prof. Arnold Bregt and Prof. Sytze de Bruin. Annuncio in inglese. Fonte: Euraxess (Commissione europea).