The influence of environmental geometry and spatial symmetry on spatial updating during locomotion

Spatial updating based on self-motion cues is important to navigation in the absence of familiar landmarks. Previous studies showed that spatial updating without vision was automatic. The goal of the current study was to investigate whether ambiguous orientations indicated by visual cues affect spatial updating based on self-motion. Participants learned an object array in a rectangular room. After the objects were removed, participants maintained their actual perspective or turned 180° to face opposite walls of the room. Participants judged relative directions from imagined perspectives based on the memories of the object array. The actual and imagined perspectives were aligned or misaligned. Better performance for aligned than misaligned perspectives (sensorimotor alignment effects) was used to indicate spontaneous updating of ones' headings relative to the object array. In Experiment 1, participants turned their bodies in the middle of the room so that their distances to the walls of the room looked similar before and after turning (spatial symmetry at the turning position with the rectangular room shape). In Experiments 2-3, participants turned their bodies in a location so that the distances to the facing walls looked different before and after turning (spatial asymmetry at the turning position with the rectangular room shape). The results showed sensorimotor alignment effects in Experiments 2-3 but not in Experiment 1. These results suggest that updating self-orientation based on self-motion was cancelled by ambiguous orientations indicated by spatial symmetry at the turning position, but not cancelled by ambiguous orientations indicated by the rectangular room shape per se. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).