Department of Psychological Science, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA.
Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2022 Feb;75(2):362-373. doi: 10.1177/1747021820913295. Epub 2020 Apr 6.
A visuocentric bias has dominated the literature on spatial navigation and reorientation. Studies on visually accessed environments indicate that, during reorientation, human and non-human animals encode the geometric shape of the environment, even if this information is unnecessary and insufficient for the task. In an attempt to extend our limited knowledge on the similarities and differences between visual and non-visual navigation, here we examined whether the same phenomenon would be observed during auditory-guided reorientation. Provided with a rectangular array of four distinct auditory landmarks, blindfolded, sighted participants had to learn the location of a target object situated on a panel of an octagonal arena. Subsequent test trials were administered to understand how the task was acquired. Crucially, in a condition in which the auditory cues were indistinguishable (same sound sample), participants could still identify the correct target location, suggesting that the rectangular array of auditory landmarks was encoded as a geometric configuration. This is the first evidence of incidental encoding of geometric information with auditory cues and, consistent with the theory of functional equivalence, it supports the generalisation of mechanisms of spatial learning across encoding modalities.
视知觉偏向主导了空间导航和再定向的文献研究。对视觉环境的研究表明，在再定向过程中，人类和非人类动物会对环境的几何形状进行编码，即使这些信息对于任务来说是不必要和不充分的。为了尝试扩展我们在视觉和非视觉导航之间的相似性和差异性方面的有限知识，我们在这里研究了在听觉引导的再定向过程中是否会观察到相同的现象。在被蒙上眼睛的情况下，参与者提供了一个由四个不同听觉地标组成的矩形阵列，他们必须学习位于八角形竞技场面板上的目标物体的位置。进行后续测试以了解如何获取任务。至关重要的是，在听觉线索无法区分（相同的声音样本）的情况下，参与者仍然可以识别正确的目标位置，这表明听觉地标组成的矩形阵列被编码为一种几何配置。这是首次证明用听觉线索偶然地编码几何信息，并且与功能等效理论一致，它支持跨编码模式的空间学习机制的推广。
