Manipulating the visibility of barriers to improve spatial navigation efficiency and cognitive mapping

Abstract

Previous studies from psychology, neuroscience and geography showed that environmental barriers fragment the representation of the environment, reduce spatial navigation efficiency, distort distance estimation and make spatial updating difficult. Despite these negative effects, limited research has examined how to overcome barriers and if individual differences mediate their causes and potential interventions. We hypothesize that the reduced visibility caused by barriers plays a major role in accumulating error in spatial updating and encoding spatial relationships. We tested this using virtual navigation to grant participants 'X-ray' vision during environment encoding (i.e., barriers become translucent) and quantifying cognitive mapping benefits of counteracting fragmented visibility. We found that compared to the participants trained with naturalistic environment visibility, participants trained in the translucent environment had better performance in wayfinding and pointing tasks, which are theorized to measure navigation efficiency and cognitive mapping. Interestingly, these benefits were only observed in participants with high self-report sense of direction. Together, our results provide important insight into (1) how perceptual barrier effects manifest, even when physical fragmentation of space is held constant, (2) establish a novel intervention that can improve spatial learning, and (3) provide evidence that individual differences modulate perceptual barrier effects and the efficacy of such interventions.

Figure 1

Illustrations of the translucent and the whole-part interventions in the training. Note that all participants, regardless of the conditions assigned, navigated in the whole, opaque environment in the testing phase. Upper left: whole-opaque condition, in which all buildings were presented and were opaque. Lower left: part-opaque condition, in which only a subset of buildings was textured at a time. All buildings were opaque. Upper right: whole-translucent condition, in which all buildings were presented but the building that the participant was looking at became translucent. Lower right: part-translucent condition, in which only a subset of buildings was textured at a time and the building that the participant was looking at (including an untextured one) became translucent. The bottom panels are greyed out to reflect the fact that the part-whole manipulation was not the main focus of the current project.

Figure 2

The training and testing procedures for opaque and translucent conditions. Dark blue diamond: opaque buildings. Light blue diamond: translucent buildings. Note that only one building could be translucent at a time. In the training phase, participants searched for the target storefronts in any order. In the wayfinding task of the testing phase, however, participants searched for the storefronts in a specific order (see main text). The first and third wayfinding tasks were performed in an impenetrable environment. An additional wayfinding task was performed in a penetrable environment to bridge our previous study.

Figure 3

Illustration of a pointing task. Participants’ position was fixed at one of the target storefronts, and they were asked to use the crosshair to point to where the other target storefront was. All buildings except for the building at which participants were located were removed during the pointing task.

Figure 4

Wayfinding and pointing task performance for high and low SOD groups. Opaque conditions were a combination of whole-opaque and part-opaque conditions. Translucent conditions were a combination of whole-translucent and part-translucent conditions. Error bars are ±1 SEM estimated from data within conditions. n.s. non-significant, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.005.

Figure 5

Correlations between SOD and spatial knowledge tasks performance.

Figure 6

Correlations between wayfinding and pointing task performance for high and low SOD groups, separated by opaque and translucent conditions. Translucency appears to decouple pointing and wayfinding performance in the low SOD group, but strengthens the relationship in high SOD individuals.