Human spatial memory and navigation

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The general objective of my research program has been to increase our understanding of how people represent spatial relations in memory and how people use spatial memory in navigation. My previous research showed that people tend to represent objects' locations with respect to an allocentric reference direction inside the layout when the objects are lined up forming a regular layout. I intend to ask whether that will still happen when people learn a layout of randomly placed objects in which any external cues are removed. Several studies in the literature showed that recognizing novel views in scenes was more accurate when the novel test view was caused by observer locomotion than when it was caused by scene rotation. In the proposed research, the spatial reference direction will be indicated via a marker in the scene rotation condition but not in the observer location condition. The goal is to see if recognition performance in the scene rotation condition becomes comparable to that in the observer locomotion condition. I will also investigate how people reorient after disorientation. My previous research showed that when participants learned a layout of irregularly placed objects, their pointing consistency across objects decreased after disorientation. In the proposed research, after disorientation, participants will be told either their facing direction or their original learning direction. The goal is to examine whether disorientation effect will disappear in either condition. The proposed research should advance our understanding of how people represent locations of objects and how they use spatial memory during navigation. This is an important real-world skill in many contexts. The proposed research will elaborate and constrain theoretical models of spatial memory and navigation, both my own and those of others. It should also help our understanding the roles of the reference direction, viewpoint change, and locomotion in recognizing scenes, shapes, and objects. Hence, the findings should be informative in forming a universal model of visual processing in 3D environments.