title: Cognitive mapping in humans and its relationship to other orientation skills.
abstract: Human orientation in novel and familiar environments is a complex skill that can involve numerous different strategies. To date, a comprehensive account of how these strategies interrelate at the behavioural level has not been documented, impeding the development of elaborate systems neuroscience models of spatial orientation. Here, we describe a virtual environment test battery designed to assess five of the core strategies used by humans to orient. Our results indicate that the ability to form a cognitive map is highly related to more basic orientation strategies, supporting previous proposals that encoding a cognitive map requires inputs from multiple domains of spatial processing. These findings provide a topology of numerous primary orientation strategies used by humans during orientation and will allow researchers to elaborate on neural models of spatial cognition that currently do not account for how different orientation strategies integrate over time based on environmental conditions.
authors.affiliation: NeuroLab, Department of Psychology, and Hotchkiss Brain Institute-A062, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive, NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada. aarnold@ucalgary.ca
authors.forename: Aiden E G F
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Arnold
authors.forename: Ford
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Burles
authors.forename: Taisya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Krivoruchko
authors.forename: Irene
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Colin D
authors.initials: CD
authors.lastname: Rey
authors.forename: Richard M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Levy
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Iaria
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004777:Environment; D005106:Exploratory Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013037:Spatial Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D014584:User-Computer Interface