Especially in informal learning settings learners are often surrounded by important information. In museums, exhibitions, botanical gardens or historical places the learning content is not only in front of the visitors but is arranged in the 3-dimensional room around them. Also, many virtual learning settings are characterized by the fact, that content is all around the viewer at every single point of time. This spatial arrangement forces viewers to focus their visual attention on a subset of information at every single point of time. The question is, what influences where users orient their attention and thereby determines, which learning content is focused?

Former studies with virtual rooms found that users learned picture pairs better if both pictures were presented on the same wall instead of being arranged on two adjacent walls, i.e. room corners had a detrimental effect on pair memory (Garsoffky & Schwan, 2024). Descriptively, this effect seemed to be connected with the orientation of the central field of view during learning: Participants in the virtual learning environment most of the time oriented their central field of view towards the middle of the walls and it can be assumed that this viewing behavior led to a sub-grouping of the information in a “wall-wise” manner, what promoted memory for picture pairs that were displayed on the same wall and impeded learning of picture pairs displayed across two adjacent walls.

The concept of common region (Palmer, 1992) postulates that information which is spatially closer to each other is grouped together and cognitively processed as belonging together. The goal of the present study was to examine if the corner effect on memory could be overcome by arranging visual information units not evenly dispersed across the walls of a room but spatially clustered in groups that always encompassed information on the left and on the right side of a room corner.

In a laboratory study 79 participants wearing head mounted displays had to learn picture pairs displayed on the walls of a virtual room. The two pictures forming a pair were either presented on one wall or across two adjacent walls. Further, the pictures were either arranged on the walls with even spatial distance to each other, or the pictures to the left and to the right of a room corner were spatially closer to each other. Results of the significant interaction showed that if the pictures were evenly arranged on the walls the detrimental effect of corners on learning of picture pairs was replicated, i.e. pairs of pictures were memorized better if both pictures were arranged on the same wall instead of to the left and to the right of a corner. But this effect of corner was sensitive to the influence of unevenly arranged pictures: If the pictures to the left and to the right of a corner were spatially nearer to each other than the pictures on a wall, the corner effect vanished and picture pairs on the same wall were no longer memorized better than picture pairs arranged to the left and to the right of a corner.

These findings:
(i) suggest a kind of “grammar of the room” with walls and corners guiding learning and memory processes, and
(ii) that these mechanisms can be influenced by a thoughtful arrangement of information when designing learning environments that surround the learner.

Keywords: Informal learning, Virtual Reality.