Beyond the first glance: How human presence enhances visual entropy and promotes spatial learning

Abstract

Spatial learning emerges not only from static environmental cues but also from the social and semantic context embedded in our surroundings. This study investigates how human agents influence visual exploration and spatial knowledge acquisition in a controlled Virtual Reality (VR) environment, focusing on the role of contextual congruency. Participants freely explored a 1 km2 virtual city while their eye movements were recorded. Agents were visually identical across conditions but placed in locations that were either congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to the surrounding environment. Using Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we found that incongruent agents elicited longer fixations and significantly higher gaze transition entropy (GTE), a measure of scanning variability. Crucially, GTE emerged as the strongest predictor of spatial recall accuracy. These findings suggest that human-contextual incongruence promotes more flexible and distributed visual exploration, thereby enhancing spatial learning. By showing that human agents shape not only where we look but how we explore and encode space, this study contributes to a growing understanding of how social meaning guides attention and supports navigation. Author summaryWhen people explore a new environment, such as an unfamiliar city, they rely on what they see to understand and remember the space. Traditionally, research has focused on stable features like buildings or landmarks. However, real-world environments also include people, whose presence can shape how we explore and learn. In this study, participants explored a virtual city while their eye movements were tracked. Some human figures matched their surroundings, while others appeared out of place. We found that people looked longer at those unexpected figures and that their gaze patterns became more flexible and varied afterward. This broader visual exploration helped them remember the layout of the city more accurately. Our results suggest that human presence, especially when it disrupts expectations, can promote more effective learning by encouraging more complex visual engagement. These findings can provide insight into how strategically placed social cues enhance attention and memory, and more importantly, how they influence our patterns of visual exploration.