Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

360-degree indirect visual display (IVD) is becoming inevitable for emerging display technologies like security andsurveillance tasks. In this paper, we evaluated the effect of free- compared to goal-oriented exploration of an unknownvirtual environment on spatial knowledge, while using desktop 360-degree IVD. The ’goal-oriented exploration’ in thisstudy required returning to the starting position in order to complete the exploration. Spatial knowledge was assessed bycomparing the map-sketch score against the exploration-type. We found no difference in spatial knowledge across theexploration-types. However, participants with gaming experience scored significantly higher map-sketch score across theexploration-types, indicating the advantage of previous experience.