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Spatial cognition is concerned with the acquisition, organization, utilization, and revision of knowledge about spatial environments. It’s most about how people behave within space and the knowledge they built around it, rather than space itself. 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 cognition can be seen from a psychological point of view, meaning that people’s behaviour within that space is key. When people behave in space, they use cognitive maps, the most evolved form of spatial cognition. When using cognitive maps, information about landmarks and the routes between landmarks are stored and used. This knowledge can be built from various sources; from a tightly coordinated vision and locomotion (movement), but also from map symbols, verbal descriptions, and computer-based pointing systems.

According to Montello, space is implicitly referring to a person’s body and their associated actions. He mentions different kinds of space; figural space which is a space smaller than the body, vista space which the space is more extended than the human body, environmental space which is  learned by locomotion, and geographical space which is the biggest space and can only be learned through cartographic representation.

However, since space is represented in the human brain, this can also lead to distortions. When perceiving space and distance, a distortion can occur. Distances are perceived differently on whether they are considered between a given location and a location that has a high cognitive saliency, meaning that it stands out. Different perceived locations and distances can have a “reference point”, which are better known than others, more frequently visited and more visible. There are other kinds of distortions as well. Furthermore, there the distortion in distance estimation and the distortion in angle alignment. Distortion in angle alignment means that your personal north will be viewed as “the north”. The map is mentally represented according to the orientation of the personal point of view of learning. Since perceived distortion is “subjective” and not necessarily correlated with “objective distance”, distortions can happen in this phenomenon too. There can be an overestimation in downtown routes, routes with turns, curved routes and borders or obstacles.

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.

Space classification
The space can be classified according to its extension as proposed by Montello. He postulates the distinction between figural space, vista space, environmental space and geographical space.

Figural space is the first and most restricted space that refers to the area that a person’s body covers without any movement, including objects that can be easily reached.

Vista space is the second subspace that refers to the space beyond the body but that is still close enough to be completely visualized without moving, for example, a room.

Environmental space is the third subspace which is said to “contain” the body because of its large size and can only be fully explored through movement since all objects and space are not directly visible, like in a city. Environmental space is the most relevant subspace to humans for navigation because they best allow for movement throughout space in order to understand our environment.

Geographical space is the last level because it is so large that it can not be explored through movement alone and can only be fully understood through cartographic representations which can illustrate an entire continent on a map.

Reference frames
In order to build spatial knowledge, people construct a cognitive reality in which they compute their environment based on a reference point. This framing of the environment is a reference frame

Usually there is a distinction made between egocentric (Latin ego: “I”) and allocentric (ancient Greek allos: “another, external”) reference frames; Egocentric frame of reference refers to placing yourself in the environment and viewing it in the first person, which means that objects’ locations are understood relative to yourself. The egocentric frame of reference is centered around the body. Allocentric frame of reference on the other hand, refers to objects’ location based on other objects or landmarks around it. Allocentric frame of reference is centered around the world around you, not around yourself. However, a third distinction can also be made, namely the geocentric reference frame. It is similar to the allocentric reference frame in the way that it has the capacity to encode a location independent from the position of the observer. It achieves this by encoding the space relative to axes that are distributed over an extended space, not by referring to salient landmarks. The geocentric space is most commonly coordinated in terms of longitude and latitude. The difference between an allocentric reference frame and a geocentric reference frame is that an allocentric reference frame is used for smaller-scale environments, whereas a geocentric reference frame is used for large-scale environments, like earth.

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.

A reference frame can also be used while navigating in space. Here, information is encoded in a way that it effects how we memorize it. This reference frame is used when the observer has to communicate with another person about the objects contained in that space.

When navigating a space, an observer can take on either a route perspective or a survey perspective. A route perspective is when the observer navigates in relation to their own body and location, whereas a survey perspective is a bird-eye view of the environment, in order to navigate a space. The usage of a route perspective has no influence on the survey perspective in the activation of the brain, and vice versa. A perspective can be purely route or survey, but often it is a mix of the two that is used in navigation. People can switch between the two seamlessly, and often without noticing.

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.

Individual differences
There are also individual differences when it comes to experiencing space and the spatial cognition that people have. When looking at individual differences, it appears that most people have a preference for one reference frame with a different use of strategies to represent space. Some people have an inclination towards a route view (also called route strategy), while others have a preference towards a survey view (also called survey or orientation strategy). The people that prefer a route perspective also tend to describe a space more in an egocentric frame of reference. People who have an inclination towards a survey perspective also tend to use an allocentric frame of reference more often. It has been observed that the latter perform better in navigational tasks when they have to learn a route from a map. These individual differences are self-reported with questionnaires.

However, the perspective choice is also influenced by characteristics of the environment. When there is a single path in the environment, people usually choose to employ an route perspective. When the environment is open and filled with landmarks, however, people tend to choose an survey perspective.

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. Furthermore, an interaction between egocentric and allocentric view is possible. This combination is mostly used when imagining a spatial environment, and this creates a richer representation of the environment. However, when a perspective that has not yet been discovered, it’s more demanding to use this technique.

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.