Psychology of spatial cognition

Temporal and spatial contiguity are necessary for competition between events

Over the last 50 years, cue competition phenomena have shaped theoretical developments in animal and human learning. However, recent failures to observe competition effects in standard conditioning procedures, as well as the lengthy and ongoing debate surrounding cue competition in the spatial learning literature, have cast doubts on the generality of these phenomena. In the present study, we manipulated temporal contiguity between simultaneously trained predictors and outcomes (Experiments 1-4), and spatial contiguity between landmarks and goals in spatial learning (Supplemental Experiments 1 and 2; Experiment 5). Across different parametric variations, we observed overshadowing when temporal and spatial contiguity were strong, but no overshadowing when contiguity was weak. Thus, across temporal and spatial domains, we observed that contiguity is necessary for competition to occur, and that competition between cues presented simultaneously during learning is absent when these cues were either spatially or temporally discontiguous from the outcome. Consequently, we advance a model in which the contiguity between events is accounted for and which explains these results and reconciles the previously contradictory findings observed in spatial learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A rat in the sewer: How mental imagery interacts with object recognition

The role of mental imagery has been puzzling researchers for more than two millennia. Both positive and negative effects of mental imagery on information processing have been discussed. The aim of this work was to examine how mental imagery affects object recognition and associative learning. Based on different perceptual and cognitive accounts we tested our imagery-induced interaction hypothesis in a series of two experiments. According to that, mental imagery could lead to (1) a superior performance in object recognition and associative learning if these objects are imagery-congruent (semantically) and to (2) an inferior performance if these objects are imagery-incongruent. In the first experiment, we used a static environment and tested associative learning. In the second experiment, subjects encoded object information in a dynamic environment by means of a virtual sewer system. Our results demonstrate that subjects who received a role adoption task (by means of guided mental imagery) performed better when imagery-congruent objects were used and worse when imagery-incongruent objects were used. We finally discuss our findings also with respect to alternative accounts and plead for a multi-methodological approach for future research in order to solve this issue.

Peripersonal versus extrapersonal visual scene information for egocentric direction and position perception

When perceiving the visual environment, people simultaneously perceive their own direction and position in the environment (i.e., egocentric spatial perception). This study investigated what visual information in a scene is necessary for egocentric spatial perceptions. In two perception tasks (the egocentric direction and position perception tasks), observers viewed two static road images presented sequentially. In Experiment 1, the critical manipulation involved an occluded region in the road image, an extrapersonal region (far-occlusion) and a peripersonal region (near-occlusion). Egocentric direction perception was worse in the far-occlusion condition than in the no-occlusion condition, and egocentric position perceptions were worse in the far- and near-occlusion conditions than in the no-occlusion condition. In Experiment 2, we conducted the same tasks manipulating the observers' gaze location in a scene-an extrapersonal region (far-gaze), a peripersonal region (near-gaze) and the intermediate region between the former two (middle-gaze). Egocentric direction perception performance was the best in the far-gaze condition, and egocentric position perception performances were not different among gaze location conditions. These results suggest that egocentric direction perception is based on fine visual information about the extrapersonal region in a road landscape, and egocentric position perception is based on information about the entire visual scene.

Evidence of a relational spatial strategy in learning the centre of enclosures in human children (Homo sapiens)

Three- to five-year-old children were trained to localize a sensor hidden underneath the floor, in the centre of a square-shaped enclosure (1.5m×1.5m). Walking over the sensor caused a pleasant music to be played in the environment, thus engaging children in a playful spatial search. Children easily learned to find the centre of the training environment starting from random positions. After training, children were tested in enclosures of different size and/or shape: a larger square-shaped enclosure (3m×3m), a rectangle-shaped enclosure (1.5m×3m), an equilateral triangle-shaped enclosure (side 3m) and an isosceles triangle-shaped enclosure (base 1.5m; sides 3m). Children searched in the central region of the enclosures, their precision varying as a function of the similarity of the testing enclosure's shape to the shape of the training enclosure. This suggests that a relational spatial strategy was used, and that it depended on the encoding of geometrical shape. This result highlights a distinctive role of the geometric centre of enclosed spaces in place learning in children, as already observed in nonhuman species.