How does environmental knowledge allow us to come back home?

Piccardi, Laura; Palmiero, Massimiliano; Bocchi, Alessia; Boccia, Maddalena; Guariglia, Cecilia

doi:10.1007/s00221-019-05552-9

Cited by 16 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…One real possibility is that the larger and more unpredictable environment involved more visual processing resources to be completed than did the small environment of Experiment 1. Research has clearly demonstrated that visual working memory is important to constructing survey representations of the environment (see for example, Wen et al, 2013;Piccardi et al, 2019). Recent research has indicated that people with DS may have some weaknesses in some aspects of visual processing involving spatial memory and visuoconstructive tasks (Fidler, 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acquisition of Survey Knowledge by Individuals With Down Syndrome

Himmelberger

Merrill

Conners

et al. 2020

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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People with Down syndrome often exhibit deficiencies in wayfinding activities, particularly route learning (e.g., Courbois et al., 2013; Davis et al., 2014; Farran et al., 2015). Evidence concerning more sophisticated survey learning has been sparse. In the research reported here, two experiments are reported that evaluated survey learning of youth with DS and typically developing children (TD) matched on mental age. In Experiment 1, participants learned two overlapping routes consisting of three turns each through a virtual environment depicting 9 square city blocks. Following acquisition, they were tested on multiple measures of survey knowledge: finding a shortcut, identifying the direction of landmarks not currently visible from their location in the environment, and recognizing a bird's-eye representation of the overall environment. Under these conditions, which should provide relatively optimal opportunities for survey learning, the participants with DS performed comparably to TD participants matched on non-verbal ability on all of our measures of survey learning. Hence, we concluded that people with DS can acquire some survey knowledge when tasked with learning a small environment and given the opportunity to do so. In Experiment 2, the experimenter navigated participants through a large, relatively complex, virtual environment along a circuitous path, beginning and ending at a target landmark. Then, the participants were placed at a pre-specified location in the environment that they had viewed previously and instructed to navigate to the same target (a door) using the shortest possible path from their current location. They completed the task three times: once after being shown the environment one time, once after three exposures, and once after five exposures. Results indicated that the participants with DS exhibited significantly less skill at identifying the shortcut than did the TD participants, with differences emerging as the number of exposures increased. Participants with DS were also less able to recall landmarks at the end of the experiment. Overall, however, the performance of both groups was relatively poor in both experiments-with the performance of participants with DS being worse as conditions became less optimal. These results were discussed in terms of underlying mechanisms that may account for variations in survey learning as environmental complexity increases.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acquisition of Survey Knowledge by Individuals With Down Syndrome

Himmelberger

Merrill

Conners

et al. 2020

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…Then, mood scores at the first administration (baseline) were compared with mood scores at the second administration in terms of group conditions (HPL, LPL, HNL, LNL, NeuL). Results showed no significant effect: 'Group' [F (4,110) = 1.92, p = 0.11]; 'time' [F (1,110) = 3.43, p = 0.067, partial eta-squared = 0.030]; interaction effect of 'group and time' [F (4,110) = 0.71, p = 0.59]. These results allowed to rule out the possibility that effects on topographical memory were not due to individuals' mood changes, but rather on emotional landmarks.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to exclude effects on learning, delayed recall and reproduction of the eight-square sequence due to gender, firstly three separate ANOVAs were performed with gender as independent variable. Results revealed no significant gender difference in learning [F (1,113) = 3.62, p = 0.06]; delayed recall [F (1,113) = 0.05, p = 0.83] and reproduction [F (1,113) = 0.001, p = 0.98] scores. Given that gender produced no effect on the variables of interest, subsequent analyses were carried without considering gender differences.…”

Section: Analyses On Topographical Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ability to orient in the environment is crucial for human beings. There is a wide individual difference in this ability, due to several internal (e.g., gender, familiarity; spatial skills; personal attributes) and/or external (e.g., degree of landmarks differentiation; emotional landmark; environmental layout complexity; continuous environmental changes) factors (e.g., [1][2][3][4]). In particular, human beings use landmarks, the focus of the present paper (monuments, salient objects or buildings stand out from the environment), to spatial re-orient themselves [5][6][7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Role of Emotional Landmarks in Embodied and Not-Embodied Tasks

et al. 2020

Self Cite

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The role of emotional landmarks in navigation has been scarcely studied. Previous findings showed that valence and arousal of landmarks increase landmark’s salience and improve performance in navigational memory tasks. However, no study has directly explored the interplay between valence and arousal of emotionally laden landmarks in embodied and not-embodied navigational tasks. At the aim, 115 college students have been subdivided in five groups according to the landmarks they were exposed (High Positive Landmarks HPL; Low Positive Landmarks LPL; High Negative Landmarks HNL; Low Negative Landmarks LNL and Neutral Landmarks NeuL). In the embodied tasks participants were asked to learn a path in a first-person perspective and to recall it after five minutes, whereas in the not-embodied tasks participants were asked to track the learned path on a silent map and to recognize landmarks among distractors. Results highlighted firstly the key role of valence in the embodied task related to the immediate learning, but not to the delayed recall of the path, probably because of the short retention interval used. Secondly, results showed the importance of the interplay between valence and arousal in the non-embodied tasks, specifically, neutral and high negative emotional landmarks yielded the lowest performance probably because of the avoidance learning effect. Implications for future research directions are discussed.

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“…Wayfinding also involves a series of challenging behaviors that require participants to be aware of their self-location and to orient themselves [3] with the assistance of representative sensory cues from the external environment. Landmarks play an important role in providing guiding information for wayfinding in the physical environment [4,5] and can accelerate decision-making processes, especially at decision points for changing direction. Albrecht [6] discovered that landmarks had a strong relationship with participants' spatial cognition and memory.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research on Generating an Indoor Landmark Salience Model for Self-Location and Spatial Orientation from Eye-Tracking Data

Wang

Chen

Zheng

et al. 2020

IJGI

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Landmarks play an essential role in wayfinding and are closely related to cognitive processes. Eye-tracking data contain massive amounts of information that can be applied to discover the cognitive behaviors during wayfinding; however, little attention has been paid to applying such data to calculating landmark salience models. This study proposes a method for constructing an indoor landmark salience model based on eye-tracking data. First, eye-tracking data are taken to calculate landmark salience for self-location and spatial orientation tasks through partial least squares regression (PLSR). Then, indoor landmark salience attractiveness (visual, semantic and structural) is selected and trained by landmark salience based on the eye-tracking data. Lastly, the indoor landmark salience model is generated by landmark salience attractiveness. Recruiting 32 participants, we designed a laboratory eye-tracking experiment to construct and test the model. Finding 1 proves that our eye-tracking data-based modelling method is more accurate than current weighting methods. Finding 2 shows that significant differences in landmark salience occur between two tasks; thus, it is necessary to generate a landmark salience model for different tasks. Our results can contribute to providing indoor maps for different tasks.

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How does environmental knowledge allow us to come back home?

Cited by 16 publications

References 54 publications

The Acquisition of Survey Knowledge by Individuals With Down Syndrome

The Acquisition of Survey Knowledge by Individuals With Down Syndrome

The Role of Emotional Landmarks in Embodied and Not-Embodied Tasks

Research on Generating an Indoor Landmark Salience Model for Self-Location and Spatial Orientation from Eye-Tracking Data

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