Yüksel Ece, Boogaart Zachary, Weisberg Steven M
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, 945 Center Dr, Gainesville, FL, 32603, USA.
The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami, Coral Gables, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2025 Aug 7;10(1):48. doi: 10.1186/s41235-025-00654-1.
Spatial navigation relies on extracting environmental information to determine where to go. To support navigation behavior, navigational aids, such as maps, compasses, or global positioning systems (GPSs), offer access to easily extractible information, but do these aids enhance spatial memory? Here, we propose the hypothesis that navigation aids support navigation behavior when they are available but do not necessarily enhance navigation by improving the memory of a space. For example, a compass provides a global reference direction and bearing, showing where north is but may not result in a more accurate representation of an environment without the compass. We present two experiments evaluating whether people learned a large-scale, immersive virtual environment better when provided with a global reference direction. We explored whether participants used the provided reference direction to anchor their mental representation of the environment, i.e., whether their alignment of their mental map matched the cued direction. In the first (preregistered) experiment, we found no evidence of a difference in spatial memory performance between those with the compass available and those without (n = 54). The second experiment (n = 67) also revealed no difference in participants' environmental knowledge between a compass condition or a mountain range, which provided a global directional cue in a more salient and concrete form. The exploratory results revealed that the participants did not use either cue as a reference direction. Our results inform theories on how reference directions support navigation and, more broadly, how external cues are incorporated (or not) into cognitive representations.
空间导航依赖于提取环境信息来确定行进方向。为支持导航行为，导航辅助工具，如地图、指南针或全球定位系统（GPS），提供了易于提取的信息，但这些辅助工具会增强空间记忆吗？在这里，我们提出一个假设，即导航辅助工具在可用时支持导航行为，但不一定通过改善对空间的记忆来增强导航能力。例如，指南针提供了一个全局参考方向和方位，指示北方的位置，但在没有指南针的情况下，可能不会导致对环境的更准确表征。我们进行了两项实验，评估当提供全局参考方向时，人们是否能更好地学习一个大规模的沉浸式虚拟环境。我们探究了参与者是否使用提供的参考方向来锚定他们对环境的心理表征，即他们的心理地图的对齐是否与提示方向匹配。在第一个（预先注册的）实验中，我们没有发现有指南针和没有指南针的人在空间记忆表现上存在差异的证据（n = 54）。第二个实验（n = 67）也表明，在指南针条件或山脉条件下，参与者的环境知识没有差异，山脉以更显著和具体的形式提供了全局方向线索。探索性结果显示，参与者没有将任何一个线索用作参考方向。我们的结果为关于参考方向如何支持导航以及更广泛地关于外部线索如何（或不）被纳入认知表征的理论提供了依据。
