Department of Psychology, Northeast Normal University.
Department of Psychology, McMaster University.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2014 Mar;40(2):511-531. doi: 10.1037/a0035259. Epub 2013 Dec 23.
We investigated how humans encode large-scale spatial environments using a virtual taxi game. We hypothesized that if 2 connected neighborhoods are explored jointly, people will form a single integrated spatial representation of the town. However, if the neighborhoods are first learned separately and later observed to be connected, people will form separate spatial representations; this should incur an accuracy cost when inferring directions from one neighborhood to the other. Interestingly, our data instead suggest that people have a very strong tendency to form local representations, regardless of whether the neighborhoods were learned together or separately. Only when all visible distinctions between neighborhoods were removed did people behave as if they formed one integrated spatial representation. These data are broadly consistent with evidence from rodent hippocampal place cell recordings in connected boxes, and with hierarchical models of spatial coding.
我们通过一个虚拟出租车游戏来研究人类如何对大范围的空间环境进行编码。我们假设，如果两个相连的街区被一起探索，那么人们将形成一个关于整个城镇的单一、整合的空间表述。然而，如果街区是先分别学习，然后再观察它们是相连的，那么人们将形成单独的空间表述；在从一个街区推断到另一个街区的方向时，这应该会产生一个准确性成本。有趣的是，我们的数据反而表明，无论街区是一起学习还是分开学习，人们都有一种非常强烈的形成局部表述的倾向。只有当所有街区之间可见的区别都被消除时，人们的行为才表现得好像他们形成了一个整合的空间表述。这些数据与来自于连接盒子里的啮齿动物海马体位置细胞记录的证据以及空间编码的分层模型广泛一致。
