Manipulating the visibility of barriers to improve spatial navigation efficiency and cognitive mapping

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.

Exploring the effects of geographic scale on spatial learning

“…This finding indicates that low-SOD participants seemed to benefit more from the elevated perspective compared to high-SOD participants, which does not support the ability-as-enhancer hypothesis (Huk, 2006;Mayer & Sims, 1994) but instead hints at potential support for the ability-as-compensator hypothesis (Höffler & Leutner, 2011;Mayer, 2001) found in studies of digital learning via desktop computers (e.g., Lee & Wong, 2014). In contrast to the ability-as-compensator hypothesis suggesting that high spatial ability learners in particular benefit from explicit graphical presentations (e.g., He et al, 2019), an ability-as-compensator effect posits that it is the low spatial ability learners who profit from rich external representations, as a "cognitive prosthetic" (Jamieson, Cullen, McGee-Lennon, Brewster, & Evans, 2014) that helps them to build an adequate mental model. In the current study, an elevated perspective might act as a "cognitive prosthetic" for participants with low sense of direction; that is, low spatial ability learners could gain a particular benefit from accessing an elevated perspective as they have difficulty mentally constructing their own representation when experiencing the environment at ground level alone.…”

“…This may provide an extra advantage to spatial learning in the G + E or E groups. Alternatively, keeping participants in these groups staying on the ground while allowing them to see through the hedges along the route would help to eliminate the group difference in the angle of view (e.g., He et al, 2019;Piller, 2006). On the other hand, while geographic scale is a continuous concept, it was manipulated as two perspectives in the current study and was largely dependent on the number of landmarks that can be seen from a single viewpoint.…”

“…There are two ways to manipulate geographic scale: changing the environment to increase visibility from single locations, or changing the perspective of the learner (e.g., Barra, Laou, Poline, Lebihan, & Berthoz, 2012;Restat, Steck, Mochnatzki, & Mallot, 2004;Zhao & Klippel, 2019). Previous studies from psychology and geography have shown that spatial learning can be enhanced by using transparent instead of opaque environments (Belingard & Péruch, 2000;He, McNamara, & Brown, 2019;Piller, 2006;Piller & Sebrechts, 2003). For example, Piller (2006) examined how the spatial layout of a virtual building can be learned by making the walls along the route transparent in which participants could see through the walls but could not pass through them.…”

“…Results from the study show that compared to the opaque, naturalistic environment, participants who were trained in the transparent environment showed more rapid learning of survey knowledge, and quality of map drawings indicated that the transparent VE led to a more integrated spatial mental model than did opaque navigational learning. In a more recent study, He et al (2019) investigated the effects of barriers on spatial learning and memory in a virtual shopping mall which were compartmentalized by doors, walls, and buildings. Environment visibility was enhanced by granting participants X-ray vision during spatial learning (i.e., all or a subset of buildings that the participant was looking at became transparent).…”

The human brain uses spatial schemas to represent segmented environments

“…15 Human psychological work has observed behavioral patterns that are consistent with schematization 36 and grouping. 3,10,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43] However, interpretation of these results-and also previous neural findings-is complicated by the fact that most previous studies used environments in which subspaces were defined by boundaries that restricted the view between segments 37,38,40,44 and constrained participants' movements such that they tended to spend time in each subspace before moving to the next one. 45,46 Therefore, many previously observed segmentation effects could be a byproduct of the brain's proclivity to organize memories by shared perceptual context 14,47 or temporal and probabilistic contiguity.…”