Abstract
During navigation people may adopt three different spatial styles (i.e., Landmark, Route, and Survey). Landmark style (LS) people are able to recall familiar landmarks but cannot combine them with directional information; Route style (RS) people connect landmarks to each other using egocentric information about direction; Survey style (SS) people use a map-like representation of the environment. SS individuals generally navigate better than LS and RS people. Fifty-one college students (20 LS; 17 RS, and 14 SS) took part in the experiment. The spatial cognitive style (SCS) was assessed by means of the SCS test; participants then had to learn a schematic map of a city, and after 5 min had to recall the path depicted on it. During the learning and delayed recall phases, eye-movements were recorded. Our intent was to investigate whether there is a peculiar way to explore an environmental map related to the individual’s spatial style. Results support the presence of differences in the strategy used by the three spatial styles for learning the path and its delayed recall. Specifically, LS individuals produced a greater number of fixations of short duration, while the opposite eye movement pattern characterized SS individuals. Moreover, SS individuals showed a more spread and comprehensive explorative pattern of the map, while LS individuals focused their exploration on the path and related targets. RS individuals showed a pattern of exploration at a level of proficiency between LS and SS individuals. We discuss the clinical and anatomical implications of our data.
Highlights
How does the brain build up a map of the environment and how can individuals navigate through a complex space? The answer to these questions has been partially provided by the discovery of place (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971) and grid cells (Hafting et al, 2005), components of a “positioning system” that allows rats to localize a specific area in a space (Moser et al, 2015)
Concerning the selection of either the correct blocks or the distractors, the groups differed significantly in the number of both selected target (F(2,48) = 8.86; p < 0.001) and non-target blocks (F(2,48) = 4.50; p < 0.05); post hoc analyses showed that survey style (SS) selected more correct targets (7.6) than Landmark style (LS) (6.2; p < 0.005) and Route style (RS) (6.9; p < 0.05); RS in turn differed from LS (p < 0.05); in the case of non-targets, LS (1.4) differed from SS (0.4; p < 0.01), but not from RS (0.9; p = 0.13), which was comparable to LS (p = 0.15)
We hypothesized that spatial cognitive style (SCS) affect the way an individual observes novel environmental features during the learning of an environment or a route, so that each SCS corresponds to a typical pattern of visual exploration
Summary
How does the brain build up a map of the environment and how can individuals navigate through a complex space? The answer to these questions has been partially provided by the discovery of place (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971) and grid cells (Hafting et al, 2005), components of a “positioning system” that allows rats to localize a specific area in a space (Moser et al, 2015). According to Siegel and White’s (1975) model, different kinds of environmental knowledge can be acquired and represented depending on the type of information selected: landmark knowledge, by which an individual “beacons” toward environmental patterns perceptually salient or important for him/her, is a sort of figurative memory; route knowledge, by which an individual navigates relying on the memory of the paths that connect different landmarks, is organized on the basis of body references, that is, an egocentric frame of references; and survey knowledge, which corresponds to a global representation of the environment, like a map (i.e., a cognitive map), allows new paths to be found between different locations and implies the encoding of directions and distances between places regardless of the person’s position, that is, allocentric frames of reference or coordinates (e.g., north, south, east, and west [cardinal points]). People with LS are less proficient in navigation and experience more frequently the feeling of getting lost, while people with route style are more able to correctly decide where and when to turn right or left if a specific landmark is present along the path, and people with SS are very proficient navigators able to retain the spatial layout of an environment, find a shortcut between two locations or create an interconnected network among different paths without the aid of specific landmarks (Nori and Piccardi, 2011)
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