The Disruptive Effect of Exposure to Fearful Faces on Wayfinding: A Research in Virtual Reality

Finding one’s way in unfamiliar environments is an essential ability. When navigating, we are overwhelmed with an enormous amount of information, and since we are relatively selective, some might be more relevant than others. Despite the well-established mechanisms underlying orientational skills, and the notable effects of facial emotions on most cognitive processes, little is known about emotions’ effects on spatial navigation. Hereby, this study aimed to explore how exposure to others’ negative emotional facial expressions affects wayfinding performances. Moreover, gender differences that characterise both processes were considered. Participants (N=54, 30 females) entered twice three realistic virtual environments created employing Virtual Reality: first, to encode a route to find an object (T1) and then to recall the learned path to reach the same object again (T2). In between the two phases, participants were asked to undergo a gender categorisation task and were exposed to sixty faces showing either neutral, fearful, or angry expressions. Results showed a significant interaction between emotions, time, and gender. In particular, the exposition to fearful faces, not angry ones, decreased males’ navigational performances, while females were unaffected by either emotional condition. Possible explanations for such gender and emotional dissimilarities are discussed. Keywords: Navigation, Faces, Emotions, Fear, Virtual Reality