Cognitive maps integrating locations but missing orientations in across-boundary environments.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Spatial Cognition
• Human Navigation

Background:

• Accurate spatial awareness across environmental boundaries is crucial for navigation.
• Previous research suggests cognitive maps integrate locations and orientations, but empirical evidence is debated.
• Difficulty in pointing across indoor-outdoor boundaries challenges the notion of a unified cognitive map.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether cognitive maps integrate locations and orientations across environmental boundaries.
• To determine if a lack of integrated orientation representations explains difficulties in cross-boundary pointing.
• To differentiate between location and orientation representation integration in cognitive mapping.

Main Methods:

• Utilized immersive virtual reality (VR) with panoramic photos of campus buildings (indoor/outdoor).
• Participants familiarized with location, oriented to a specific direction, and pointed to other buildings.
• Calculated represented locations and headings by maximizing pointing direction similarity.

Main Results:

• Absolute pointing errors were significantly greater when participants were indoors compared to outdoors.
• The indoor-outdoor difference in error was primarily driven by heading estimation, not location estimation.
• Systematic, consistent positional shifts were observed within views of the same building (indoor/outdoor), but not across different buildings.

Conclusions:

• Findings suggest cognitive maps may possess distorted but globally consistent location representations across boundaries.
• The results support the hypothesis that integrated orientation representations are crucial for accurate cross-boundary spatial cognition.
• Individual cognitive maps may prioritize orientation integration for specific environments, leading to cross-boundary inaccuracies.