Abstract
Several studies investigating environmental navigation require participants to navigate in virtual environments, in which the proprioceptive and vestibular components present during real environmental navigation are lost. Here, we aimed to provide a novel computerized ecological navigational battery, investigating whether the absence of proprioceptive and vestibular inputs yields a representation of the navigational space comparable to that acquired ecologically. In Study 1, 38 participants underwent two sets of tasks, one performed in a laboratory-based setting (LBS) and the other in an ecological environment (EE), with both including evaluation of route, landmark, and survey knowledge and a landmark ordering task. All tasks, except the route task, significantly correlated between EE and LBS. In LBS, performance in the landmark ordering task was predicted by that in the survey task, but not by those in the route and landmark tasks. Results of Study 1 were replicated in Study 2, in which 44 participants completed a modified and shorter online version of LBS tests. Reliability of the online LBS tests was also tested and showed a moderate-to-high internal consistency. Overall, results show that the conditions in which tasks are performed affect the acquisition of route knowledge, likely due to the lack of proprioceptive and vestibular information in LBS. However, LBS tasks presented here provide a standard battery of tests that can overcome the replicability problems encountered by ecological navigation tests, while taking into consideration all the complexities of navigational processes in terms of the use of landmark, route, and survey strategies.
Highlights
Spatial navigation is a multimodal process that requires a dynamic integration between perception, attention, memory, and decision-making (Ekstrom et al, 2014)
A spatial updating system located in the parietal cortex provides egocentric representations of positions and allows one to access long-term memories stored in an allocentric format in the medial temporal areas (Byrne et al, 2007)
We investigated whether the mental representations of the navigational space developed in a laboratory-based setting (LBS), in absence of proprioceptive and vestibular inputs, are similar to those acquired ecologically in a real environment
Summary
Spatial navigation is a multimodal process that requires a dynamic integration between perception, attention, memory, and decision-making (Ekstrom et al, 2014). Information from vestibular and proprioceptive systems is integrated with information from visual and auditory sensory systems (Chun et al, 2019) In this context, visual inputs are crucial, since they provide a more accurate estimate of the direction in which we are navigating (Cheng & Gu, 2018). Vision alone could guide navigation without the need for any spatial representation, somatosensory and proprioceptive cues are important for computing length and estimating turning angles. Both visual and somatosensory/proprioceptive inputs are necessary to form high-level spatial representations (Ekstrom et al, 2017)
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