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Abstract:
The Social and Spatial Cognition group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics employs interactive virtual environments to examine cognitive processes underlying navigation and social interaction. Our research on navigation showed that humans physically walking through
complex multi-corridor/-street spaces memorize these spaces within multiple, local reference frames. In case humans also had access to maps as, for example, in their city of residency, they rely on a mapbased reference frames for survey estimates, but on local reference frames for route planning. By having participants learn the same layout by manipulating the learning conditions we showed that
separation into multiple reference frames is not driven by active walking or successive visibility of the elements, for example, when walking down multiple streets, but rather by having no common visible reference present during learning. We conclude that humans compartmentalize their surrounding within memory and visual access seems to be the crucial factor of separation.
