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Spatial cognition is concerned with the acquisition, organization, utilization, and revision of knowledge about spatial environments. These capabilities enable individuals to manage basic and high-level cognitive tasks in everyday life. Numerous disciplines (such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, geographic Information science, cartography, etc.) work together to understand spatial cognition in different species, especially in humans. Thereby, spatial cognition studies also have helped to link cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Scientists in both fields work together to figure out what role spatial cognition plays in the brain as well as to determine the surrounding neurobiological infrastructure.

Spatial cognition is closely related to how people talk about their environment, find their way in new surroundings and plan routes. Thus a wide range of studies is based on participants reports, performance measures and similar, for example in order to determine cognitive reference frames that allow subjects to perform. In this context the implementation of Virtual Reality becomes more and more widespread among researchers, since it offers the opportunity to confront participants with unknown environments in a highly controlled manner.

Spatial knowledge
A classical approach to the acquisition of spatial knowledge, proposed by Siegel & White in 1975, defines three types of spatial knowledge – landmarks, route knowledge and survey knowledge – and draws a picture of these three as stepstones in a successive development of spatial knowledge.

Within this framework, landmarks can be understood as salient objects in the environment of an actor, which are memorized without information about any metric relations at first. By traveling between landmarks, route knowledge evolves, which can be seen as sequential information about the space which connects landmarks. Finally, increased familiarity with an environment allows the development of so-called survey knowledge, which integrates both landmarks and routes and relates it to a fixed coordinate system, i. e. in terms of metric relations and alignment to absolute categories like compass bearings etc. This results in abilities like taking shortcuts never taken before, for example.

More recently, newer findings challenged this stairway-like model of acquisition of spatial knowledge. Whereas familiarity with an environment seems to be a crucial predictor of navigational performance indeed, in many cases even survey knowledge can be established after minimal exploration of a new environment.

In this context, Daniel R. Montello proposed a new framework, indicating, that the changes in spatial knowledge ongoing with growing experience are rather quantitative than qualitative, i. e. different types of spatial knowledge become just more precise and confident. Furthermore, the use of these different types seems to be predominantly task-dependent, which leads to the conclusion that spatial navigation in everyday life requires multiple strategies with different emphasis on landmarks, routes and overall survey knowledge.

Reference frames
Which type of spatial knowledge is acquired in a special situation depends also from the respective source of information.

Active navigation appears to have a bigger impact on the establishment of route knowledge, whereas the use of a map seemingly better supports survey knowledge about more large-scaled complex environments.

In this context, a discussion came up about different reference frames, which are the frameworks wherein spatial information is encoded. In general, two of them can be distinguished as the egocentric (Latin ego: “I”) and the allocentric (ancient Greek allos: “another, external”) reference frame.

Within an egocentric reference frame, spatial information is encoded in terms of relations to the physical body of a navigator, whereas the allocentric reference frame defines relations of objects among each other, that is independent of the physical body of an “observer” and thus in a more absolute way, which takes metrical conditions and general alignments like cardinal directions into account. This suggests, that route knowledge, which is supported by direct navigation, is more likely to be encoded within an egocentric reference frame and survey knowledge, which is supported by map learning, to be more likely to be encoded within an allocentric reference frame in turn.

Whilst spatial information can be stored into these different frames, they already seem to develop together in early stages of childhood and appear to be necessarily used in combination in order to solve everyday life tasks.

Distortion
As there are biases in other topics of psychology, there are also biases within the concept of spatial cognition. People make systematic errors when they utilize or try to retain information from spatial representations of the environment, such as geographic maps. This shows that their mental representation of the maps and the knowledge they reflect are systematically distorted. Distortions are repetitive errors (bias) that people show in their cognitive maps when they are asked to estimate distances or angles. When an organism’s natural spatial perception is harmed, spatial distortion arises. This can be created experimentally in a variety of sensory modalities. Different types of distortions exist.

First of all, people tend to make errors when it comes to estimating a distance. When compared to their true measurements on a curved surface of the globe, there is a misconception of shape, size, distance, or direction between geographical landmarks. This appears to happen because you cannot display 3D surfaces into two perfect dimensions. People tend to regularize their cognitive maps by distorting the position of relatively small features (e.g., cities) to make them comform with the position of larger features (e.g., state boundaries). Our route lengths tend to be overestimated, routes with major bends and curves are estimated longer than lineair routes. When interpreting the geographical relationships between two locations that are in separate geographical or political entities, people make enormous systematic errors. The presence of a border, physical as well as emotional, contributes to biases in estimating distances between elements. People tend to overestimate the distance between two cities that belonged to two different regions or countries. The distortion of distance might also be caused by the presence of salient landmarks. Some environmental features are not cognitively equal; some may be larger, older, more well-known or more central in our daily life activities. These landmarks are frequently used as reference elements for less salient elements. When one element in a location is more salient, the distance between the reference point and the other point is estimated as shorter.

Second, there is a distortion when it comes to alignment. Alignment means arrangement in a straight line. When objects are alinged with each other it is much easier to estimate the distance between these objects and to switch between different egocentric viewpoints of both objects. When a mental representation of any spatial environment needs to be created, people tend to have way more errors when the object in a spatial environment are not alinged with one another. This is especially the case when the different objects are memorized seperately. When a person sees an object, there will be less errors in spatial cognition when the placement of this object is facing the person's egocentic north. The performance within spatial cognition is the best when the orientation is north-facing and decreases linearly with the angle of misalignment.

Finally, the angle in which an object is placed in relation to another object, plays a major role in having distortions when it comes to spatial cognition. The amount of angular errors increased significantly when the angle between two objects exceeds 90 degrees. This phenomenon occurs in all age groups, e.g. younger, middle-aged and older adults. When an angle is unknown and has to be estimated, people tend to guess close to 90 degrees. Besides that, the angular error also increases when the object or place towards which we are pointing (outside our visual field) is further away from our egocentric space. Familiarity plays an important role. Pointing errors are less towards places that are familiar than towards unfamiliar places. When people have to use their spatial memory to guess an angle, forward errors are significantly smaller than backward errors, implying that memorizing the opposite direction is more difficult than memorizing the forward direction of travel.

Coding
There are many strategies used to spatially encode the environment, and they are often used together within the same task. In a recent study, König et aliae provided further evidence by letting participants learn the positions of streets and houses from an interactive map. Participants reproduced their knowledge in both relative and absolute terms by indicating the positions of houses and streets in relation to one another and their absolute locations using cardinal directions. Some participants were allowed three seconds to form their description, while others were not given a time limit. Their conclusions show that positions of houses were best remembered in relative tasks, while streets were best remembered in absolute tasks, and that increasing allotted time for cognitive reasoning improved performance for both.

These findings suggest, that circumscribed objects like houses, which would be sensory available at one moment during an active exploration, are more likely to be encoded in a relative/binary coded way and that time for cognitive reasoning allows the conversion into an absolute/unitary coded format, which is the deduction of their absolute position in line with cardinal directions, compass bearings etc. Contrary, bigger and more abstract objects like streets are more likely to be encoded in an absolute manner from the beginning.

That confirms the view of mixed strategies, in this case that spatial information of different objects is coded in distinct ways within the same task. Moreover, the orientation and location of objects like houses seems to be primarily learned in an action-oriented way, which is also in line with an enactive framework for human cognition.

Spatial cognition in genders
In a study of two congeneric rodent species, sex differences in hippocampal size were predicted by sex-specific patterns of spatial cognition. Hippocampal size is known to correlate positively with maze performance in laboratory mouse strains and with selective pressure for spatial memory among passerine bird species. In polygamous vole species (Rodentia: Microtus), males range more widely than females in the field and perform better on laboratory measures of spatial ability; both of these differences are absent in monogamous vole species. Ten females and males were taken from natural populations of two vole species, the polygamous meadow vole, M. pennsylvanicus, and the monogamous pine vole, M. pinetorum. Only in the polygamous species do males have larger hippocampi relative to the entire brain than do females. This study shows that spatial cognition can vary depending on your gender.

Our study aimed to determine whether male cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis; cephalopod mollusc) range over a larger area than females and whether this difference is associated with a cognitive dimorphism in orientation abilities. First, we assessed the distance travelled by sexually immature and mature cuttlefish of both sexes when placed in an open field (test 1). Second, cuttlefish were trained to solve a spatial task in a T-maze, and the spatial strategy preferentially used (right/left turn or visual cues) was determined (test 2). Our results showed that sexually mature males travelled a longer distance in test 1, and were more likely to use visual cues to orient in test 2, compared with the other three groups.