21
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      Wormholes in virtual space: From cognitive maps to cognitive graphs

      , , ,
      Cognition
      Elsevier BV

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Humans and other animals build up spatial knowledge of the environment on the basis of visual information and path integration. We compare three hypotheses about the geometry of this knowledge of navigation space: (a) 'cognitive map' with metric Euclidean structure and a consistent coordinate system, (b) 'topological graph' or network of paths between places, and (c) 'labelled graph' incorporating local metric information about path lengths and junction angles. In two experiments, participants walked in a non-Euclidean environment, a virtual hedge maze containing two 'wormholes' that visually rotated and teleported them between locations. During training, they learned the metric locations of eight target objects from a 'home' location, which were visible individually. During testing, shorter wormhole routes to a target were preferred, and novel shortcuts were directional, contrary to the topological hypothesis. Shortcuts were strongly biased by the wormholes, with mean constant errors of 37° and 41° (45° expected), revealing violations of the metric postulates in spatial knowledge. In addition, shortcuts to targets near wormholes shifted relative to flanking targets, revealing 'rips' (86% of cases), 'folds' (91%), and ordinal reversals (66%) in spatial knowledge. Moreover, participants were completely unaware of these geometric inconsistencies, reflecting a surprising insensitivity to Euclidean structure. The probability of the shortcut data under the Euclidean map model and labelled graph model indicated decisive support for the latter (BFGM>100). We conclude that knowledge of navigation space is best characterized by a labelled graph, in which local metric information is approximate, geometrically inconsistent, and not embedded in a common coordinate system. This class of 'cognitive graph' models supports route finding, novel detours, and rough shortcuts, and has the potential to unify a range of data on spatial navigation.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Cognition
          Cognition
          Elsevier BV
          00100277
          September 2017
          September 2017
          : 166
          : 152-163
          Article
          10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.020
          28577445
          f444d743-c544-404e-96e3-9f5bb6ab2d7a
          © 2017

          https://www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/

          http://www.elsevier.com/open-access/userlicense/1.0/

          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article