Piccardi Laura, Guariglia Paola, Nori Raffaella, Palmiero Massimiliano
Life, Health and Environmental Science Department, L'Aquila University, 67100 L'Aquila, Italy.
Cognitive and Motor Rehabilitation and Neuroimaging Unit, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, 00179 Rome, Italy.
Brain Sci. 2020 Jan 21;10(2):58. doi: 10.3390/brainsci10020058.
The role of emotional landmarks in navigation has been scarcely studied. Previous findings showed that valence and arousal of landmarks increase landmark's salience and improve performance in navigational memory tasks. However, no study has directly explored the interplay between valence and arousal of emotionally laden landmarks in embodied and not-embodied navigational tasks. At the aim, 115 college students have been subdivided in five groups according to the landmarks they were exposed (High Positive Landmarks HPL; Low Positive Landmarks LPL; High Negative Landmarks HNL; Low Negative Landmarks LNL and Neutral Landmarks NeuL). In the embodied tasks participants were asked to learn a path in a first-person perspective and to recall it after five minutes, whereas in the not-embodied tasks participants were asked to track the learned path on a silent map and to recognize landmarks among distractors. Results highlighted firstly the key role of valence in the embodied task related to the immediate learning, but not to the delayed recall of the path, probably because of the short retention interval used. Secondly, results showed the importance of the interplay between valence and arousal in the non-embodied tasks, specifically, neutral and high negative emotional landmarks yielded the lowest performance probably because of the avoidance learning effect. Implications for future research directions are discussed.
情感地标在导航中的作用鲜有研究。先前的研究结果表明，地标的效价和唤醒度会增加地标的显著性，并提高导航记忆任务的表现。然而，尚无研究直接探讨在具身和非具身导航任务中，充满情感的地标的效价和唤醒度之间的相互作用。为此，115名大学生根据他们所接触的地标被分为五组（高积极地标组HPL；低积极地标组LPL；高消极地标组HNL；低消极地标组LNL和中性地标组NeuL）。在具身任务中，要求参与者以第一人称视角学习一条路径，并在五分钟后回忆；而在非具身任务中，要求参与者在一张无声地图上追踪所学路径，并在干扰物中识别地标。结果首先突出了效价在与即时学习相关的具身任务中的关键作用，但与路径的延迟回忆无关，这可能是由于所使用的保持间隔较短。其次，结果表明在非具身任务中，效价和唤醒度之间相互作用的重要性，具体而言，中性和高消极情感地标产生的表现最低，这可能是由于回避学习效应。文中还讨论了对未来研究方向的启示。
