Buckley, Matthew G., Austen, Joe M. and McGregor, Anthony (2024). The role of distal landmarks and individual differences in acquiring spatial representations that support flexible and automatic wayfinding. Journal of Environmental Psychology ,
Abstract
Theories of parallel memory systems suggest that flexible wayfinding (e.g., shortcutting) requires knowledge about the spatial structure of an environment, whereas automatic wayfinding (e.g., route-following) does not. Distal landmarks have widely been assumed to promote learning a spatial representation of an environment and, thus, flexible wayfinding through it. There is, however, little behavioural evidence to corroborate this assumption. In three experiments reported here, participants learned a circuitous route through a large-scale virtual garden maze, after which they completed orientation and wayfinding tests that measured their knowledge of the spatial structure of the environment and ability to shortcut through it, respectively. In Experiment 1, we found no evidence of a benefit to navigation in the presence versus the absence of distal landmarks when participants had continuous experience of the learned route, but pointing accuracy and shortcutting ability decreased when the learned route was complex compared to simple. In Experiment 2, participants learned a simple circuitous route in segments, and we observed superior knowledge of how the separately learned local spaces were aligned in the presence versus the absence of distal landmarks. Across all experiments, consistent with parallel memory systems, we observed that knowledge of the spatial structure of the environment was related to shortcutting but not route-following. This pattern of data suggests that distal landmarks promote the integration of separately learned local spaces into a coherent global representation, but do not promote learning of local spaces beyond what can be achieved by tracking self-motion.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102391 |
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Divisions: | College of Health & Life Sciences College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Psychology College of Health & Life Sciences > Aston Institute of Health & Neurodevelopment (AIHN) |
Additional Information: | Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Publication ISSN: | 1522-9610 |
Last Modified: | 09 Aug 2024 14:44 |
Date Deposited: | 09 Aug 2024 14:44 |
Full Text Link: | |
Related URLs: |
https://linking ... 272494424001646
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PURE Output Type: | Article |
Published Date: | 2024-08-08 |
Published Online Date: | 2024-08-08 |
Accepted Date: | 2024-08-05 |
Authors: |
Buckley, Matthew G.
(![]() Austen, Joe M. McGregor, Anthony |