Abstract
Previous studies from psychology, neuroscience and geography showed that environmental barriers fragment the representation of the environment, reduce spatial navigation efficiency, distort distance estimation and make spatial updating difficult. Despite these negative effects, limited research has examined how to overcome barriers and if individual differences mediate their causes and potential interventions. We hypothesize that the reduced visibility caused by barriers plays a major role in accumulating error in spatial updating and encoding spatial relationships. We tested this using virtual navigation to grant participants ‘X-ray’ vision during environment encoding (i.e., barriers become translucent) and quantifying cognitive mapping benefits of counteracting fragmented visibility. We found that compared to the participants trained with naturalistic environment visibility, participants trained in the translucent environment had better performance in wayfinding and pointing tasks, which are theorized to measure navigation efficiency and cognitive mapping. Interestingly, these benefits were only observed in participants with high self-report sense of direction. Together, our results provide important insight into (1) how perceptual barrier effects manifest, even when physical fragmentation of space is held constant, (2) establish a novel intervention that can improve spatial learning, and (3) provide evidence that individual differences modulate perceptual barrier effects and the efficacy of such interventions.
Highlights
Spatial navigation is one of the most fundamental functions in our daily life
Given the amount of research showing effects imposed by barriers in spatial learning and memory, it is surprising that limited research has examined how to overcome barrier effects for improving spatial learning and memory and how individual differences factor into barrier effects and the efficacy of interventions
Overall self-report sense of direction (SOD) and spatial strategy preference distributions were similar across conditions (Supplemental Table 1)
Summary
Spatial navigation is one of the most fundamental functions in our daily life. Whereas it is easy to travel unimpeded to various locations in an environment with an open field structure such as African grasslands, it can be very challenging to find destinations in urban environments[1] which are compartmentalized by barriers (e.g., doors, walls and buildings), without step-wise directions. We define barriers in the current project as entities that can cause disruptions of continuous movement The presence of such barriers often reduces both visibility[14] and affordance[15]. The results of that study suggested that manipulating barriers’ affordance could increase map-like spatial knowledge (straight-line relationships between locations) but not navigation efficiency (wayfinding route performance connecting locations). In the current study we manipulated the visibility component of barriers and investigated how it impacted navigation efficiency and cognitive mapping. To counteract the reduced visibility, we rendered the barriers translucent (Fig. 1) in the virtual environment, while holding structural affordances constant, and quantified the impact of this manipulation on navigation efficiency and cognitive mapping, compared to an opaque environment. We created a 2 × 2 design in which translucency and part-whole training were factorially combined
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