School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA.
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA.
Sci Rep. 2019 Aug 9;9(1):11567. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-48098-0.
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.
先前来自心理学、神经科学和地理学的研究表明，环境障碍会使环境的表示碎片化，降低空间导航效率，扭曲距离估计并使空间更新变得困难。尽管存在这些负面影响，但很少有研究探讨如何克服障碍，以及个体差异是否会调节其原因和潜在干预措施。我们假设，障碍物造成的可见度降低在空间更新和编码空间关系中的累积误差中起着重要作用。我们使用虚拟导航来测试这一点，即在环境编码期间给予参与者“X 光”视觉（即障碍物变得半透明），并量化对抗碎片化可见度的认知绘图益处。我们发现，与在自然环境可见度下接受训练的参与者相比，在半透明环境中接受训练的参与者在寻路和指向任务方面的表现更好，这些任务被认为可以衡量导航效率和认知绘图。有趣的是，这些益处仅在自我报告方向感较高的参与者中观察到。总之，我们的结果提供了重要的见解，即（1）即使空间的物理碎片化保持不变，感知障碍效应是如何表现的，（2）建立了一种可以改善空间学习的新干预措施，（3）提供了证据表明个体差异调节感知障碍效应和这种干预措施的效果。
