Abstract
It has been suggested that the map-like representations that support human spatial memory are fragmented into sub-maps with local reference frames, rather than being unitary and global. However, the principles underlying the structure of these ‘cognitive maps’ are not well understood. We propose that the structure of the representations of navigation space arises from clustering within individual psychological spaces, i.e. from a process that groups together objects that are close in these spaces. Building on the ideas of representational geometry and similarity-based representations in cognitive science, we formulate methods for learning dissimilarity functions (metrics) characterizing participants’ psychological spaces. We show that these learned metrics, together with a probabilistic model of clustering based on the Bayesian cognition paradigm, allow prediction of participants’ cognitive map structures in advance. Apart from insights into spatial representation learning in human cognition, these methods could facilitate novel computational tools capable of using human-like spatial concepts. We also compare several features influencing spatial memory structure, including spatial distance, visual similarity and functional similarity, and report strong correlations between these dimensions and the grouping probability in participants’ spatial representations, providing further support for clustering in spatial memory.
Highlights
MotivationThere has been considerable research on spatial representations facilitating navigation since Tolman coined the term ‘cognitive map’ [1]
We have provided the first attempt at a quantitative answer, hypothesizing that cognitive map structure arises from clustering in some subject-specific psychological space, including a list of features such as spatial distance, separating boundaries and streets, and visual and functional similarity
As this claim implies a strong dependence between whether or not objects are stored on the same representations, and these features, we have examined this dependence using subjects from over a hundred cities worldwide
Summary
MotivationThere has been considerable research on spatial representations facilitating navigation since Tolman coined the term ‘cognitive map’ [1]. Behavioural evidence has suggested that human spatial maps are structured, and has been interpreted as comprising multi-level hierarchies [6,7,8,9,10], or at least as having multiple local reference frames [11, 12] These hierarchies, extracted from recall sequences, can be observed even in the case of randomly distributed objects with no boundaries [8], with participants’ response times and accuracies being affected by this structure (subjects overestimated distances between objects on different branches of the hierarchy and underestimated distances within branches, and showed shorter response times for within-branch judgements). Further evidence for the existence of multiple representations in different spatial reference frames [11,12,13] has been derived from the accuracies of judgements of relative direction, which are heavily affected by subjects’ frames of reference
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