Surface lightness influences perceived room height

Surprisingly little scientific research has been conducted on the effects of colour and lightness on the perception of spaciousness. Practitioners and architects typically suggest that a room's ceiling appears higher when it is painted lighter than the walls, while darker ceilings appear lower. Employing a virtual reality setting, we studied the effects of the lightness of different room surfaces on perceived height in two psychophysical experiments. Observers judged the height of rooms varying in physical height as well as in the lightness of ceiling, floor, and walls. Experiment 1 showed the expected increase of perceived height with increases in ceiling lightness. Unexpectedly, the perceived height additionally increased with wall lightness, and the effects of wall lightness and ceiling lightness were roughly additive, incompatible with a simple effect of the lightness contrast between the ceiling and the walls. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the floor lightness has no significant effect on perceived height, and that the total brightness of the room is not the critical factor influencing the perceived height. Neither can the results be explained by previously reported effects of brightness on apparent depth or perceived distance.     

Working memory in wayfinding-a dual task experiment in a virtual city

This study examines the working memory systems involved in human wayfinding. In the learning phase, 24 participants learned two routes in a novel photorealistic virtual environment displayed on a 220° screen while they were disrupted by a visual, a spatial, a verbal, or—in a control group—no secondary task. In the following wayfinding phase, the participants had to find and to "virtually walk" the two routes again. During this wayfinding phase, a number of dependent measures were recorded. This research shows that encoding wayfinding knowledge interfered with the verbal and with the spatial secondary task. These interferences were even stronger than the interference of wayfinding knowledge with the visual secondary task. These findings are consistent with a dual-coding approach of wayfinding knowledge.