Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Institute of Psychology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany; Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Trondheim, Norway.
Cognition. 2022 Aug;225:105126. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105126. Epub 2022 Apr 20.
Terrains in a 3D world can be undulating. Yet, most prior research has exclusively investigated spatial representations on a flat surface, leaving a 2D cognitive map as the dominant model in the field. Here, we investigated whether humans represent a curved surface by building a dimension-reduced flattened 2D map or a full 3D map. Participants learned the location of objects positioned on a flat and curved surface in a virtual environment by driving on the concave side of the surface (Experiment 1), driving and looking vertically (Experiment 2), or flying (Experiment 3). Subsequently, they were asked to retrieve either the path distance or the 3D Euclidean distance between the objects. Path distance estimation was good overall, but we found a significant underestimation bias for the path distance on the curve, suggesting an influence of potential 3D shortcuts, even though participants were only driving on the surface. Euclidean distance estimation was better when participants were exposed more to the global 3D structure of the environment by looking and flying. These results suggest that the representation of the 2D manifold, embedded in a 3D world, is neither purely 2D nor 3D. Rather, it is flexible and dependent on the behavioral experience and demand.
三维世界中的地形可能是起伏不平的。然而，大多数先前的研究仅在平面上研究空间表示，这使得二维认知地图成为该领域的主导模型。在这里，我们通过构建降维的二维平面地图或完整的三维地图来研究人类是否会对曲面进行表示。参与者通过在曲面的凹面驾驶（实验 1）、驾驶和垂直观察（实验 2）或飞行（实验 3），在虚拟环境中学习放置在平面和曲面上的物体的位置。然后，要求他们检索物体之间的路径距离或三维欧几里得距离。总体而言，路径距离估计较好，但我们发现曲线上的路径距离存在明显的低估偏差，这表明存在潜在的 3D 捷径的影响，尽管参与者仅在曲面上行驶。当参与者通过观察和飞行更多地接触环境的全局 3D 结构时，欧几里得距离的估计会更好。这些结果表明，嵌入在 3D 世界中的 2D 流形的表示既不是纯粹的 2D 也不是 3D，而是灵活的，并取决于行为经验和需求。
