Abstract
In 2 spatial navigation experiments, human participants were asked to find a hidden goal (a WiFi signal) that was located in 1 of the right-angled corners of a kite-shaped (Experiment 1) or a cross-shaped (Experiment 2) virtual environment. Goal location was defined solely with respect to the geometry of the environment. Following this training, in a test conducted in extinction, participants were placed onto the outside of the same environments and asked to locate the WiFi signal. The results of both experiments revealed that participants spent more time searching in regions on the outside of the environments that were closest to where the WiFi signal was located during training. These results are difficult to explain in terms of analyses of spatial navigation and reorientation that emphasize the role of local representational encoding or view matching. Instead, we suggest that these results are better understood in terms of a global representation of the shape of the environment.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 322-337 |
| Journal | Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 9 May 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2019 |
Bibliographical note
This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Com-mons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/),which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any me-dium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright forthis article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the AmericanPsychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article andidentify itself as the original publisherFunding: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council[grant ES/I021108/1] and contributed to Luke J. Holden’s doctorate degreeby funding a studentship