This
research examines the way in which some perceptual variables can
influence the memory of objects in a three-dimensional virtual
space, in particular their presence and spatial position. Three
groups of participants were invited to explore a virtual environment
reproducing a library, while a fourth group carried out the same
task in a real library. The virtual environment was the same in
the first three groups except for the objects' surfaces, which
were presented in a shadowed effect (white objects rendered in
256 grey scale mode), in homogeneous colours and with textures
(digital photographs of real objects) respectively. The memory
tasks after each session referred to the different sections of
the architectural structure of the library and to clusters of
objects contained in the library.
The main result shows that participants' performance in the third
group (textural surfaces in a virtual library) equals the performance
of participants in the real library for both presence and spatial
placement of objects (while no difference has been found with
respect to presence and spatial placement of the architectural
sections). In each condition, a better performance was obtained
in the memory of presence than in the memory of the spatial position.
