Boundaries in spatial cognition: Looking like a boundary is more important than being a boundary.

Abstract

2020) 'Boundaries in spatial cognition : looking like a boundary is more important than being a boundary.', Journal of experimental psychology : language, memory, and cognition., 46 (6).The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. ABSTRACTLarge walls and other typical boundaries strongly influence neural activity related to navigation and the representations of spatial layouts. They are also major aids to reliable navigation behavior in young children and non-human animals. Is this because they are physical boundaries (barriers to movement), or because they present certain visual features, such as visually extended 3D surfaces? Here, these two factors were dissociated by using immersive virtual reality and real boundaries. Eighty adults recalled target locations in one of four environments: plywood, where a virtual wall coincided with a large piece of real plywood; pass through, where the virtual wall coincided with empty space and participants could pass through it; pass over, where the virtual wall was projected downward to be visible underneath a transparent floor; and cones, where the walls were replaced with traffic cones. One condition had features that were boundaries and looked like boundaries (plywood); two had features that were not boundaries but looked like boundaries (pass over/through); and one had features that were not boundaries and did not look like boundaries (cones). The precision and bias of responses changed only as a function of looking like a boundary. This suggests that variations in spatial coding are more closely linked to the visual properties of environmental layouts than to whether they contain physical boundaries (barriers to movement).

Boundaries Reduce Disorientation in Virtual Reality

“…This provides clear evidence that texture-defined boundaries can be as effective as boundaries that impede navigation. This finding echoes other human behavioral research reporting that boundaries do not need to impede movement in order to be useful cues for spatial memory (Negen et al, 2020). The current findings are also in alignment with animal neuroscience research showing that boundary vector cells in the rodent brain respond to texture boundaries as well as walls and drop-offs (Lever et al, 2009;Stewart et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2020), and preliminary research that humans possess analogous neural representations (Lee et al, 2018;Shine et al, 2019).…”

“…One related study used a spatial memory task to compare the effect of boundaries that did or did not impede movement (Negen et al, 2020). Prior to the spatial memory task, participants in one condition were instructed to move their hand through a virtual wall, which showed them that it was not a navigational impediment.…”

Boundaries reduce disorientation in virtual reality

“…This provides clear evidence that texture-defined boundaries can be as effective as boundaries that impede navigation. This finding echoes other human behavioral research reporting that boundaries do not need to impede movement in order to be useful cues for spatial memory (Negen et al, 2020). The current findings are also in alignment with animal neuroscience research showing that boundary vector cells in the rodent brain respond to texture boundaries as well as walls and dropoffs (Lever et al, 2009;Stewart et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2020), and preliminary research that humans possess analogous neural representations Lee et al (2018); Shine et al (2019).…”

Does a row of objects comprise a boundary? How children miss the forest for the trees in spatial navigation.

“…Although there may be multiple reasons underlying children’s early failure to represent a global configuration of objects for navigation, we propose that it may be explained in part by the heavy influence of boundaries (but not discrete objects) on hippocampal mapping, even early in development (Bjerknes et al, 2014). This has been demonstrated widely, from studies of adult human behavior (Doeller & Burgess, 2008; Negen et al, 2020), functional neuroimaging (Doeller et al, 2008), and rodent hippocampal electrophysiology (Cressant et al, 1997; Keinath et al, 2017; Lever et al, 2002; O’Keefe & Burgess, 1996).…”

“…What makes a geometric configuration of objects fundamentally different from a boundary (e.g., perceptually or as affordances), and how do children develop an abstract sense of spatial geometry that is applicable to both (i.e., a rectangular array of objects/boundaries; Li et al, 2022; Spelke et al, 2010)? One possibility is that children in past studies failed to use the global geometry of configurations consisting of three or four objects for navigation (Gouteux & Spelke, 2001; Lee & Spelke, 2008; Lee, Sovrano, & Spelke, 2012; Shusterman et al, 2011; Vasilyeva & Lourenco, 2012) because these configurations did not prevent them from freely passing between the objects, thereby reducing their functional relevance as obstacles to navigation (Gianni et al, 2018; Kosslyn et al, 1974; Negen et al, 2020; Newcombe & Liben, 1982). Another possibility is that young children tested in the aforementioned studies were not able to perceive the global configuration of the object arrays.…”