An Adaptive Cue Selection Model of Allocentric Spatial Reorientation

ABSTRACT: After becoming disoriented, an organism must use the local environment to reorient and recover vectors to important locations. A new theory, adaptive combination, suggests that the information from different spatial cues is combined with Bayesian efficiency during reorientation. To test this further, we modified the standard reorientation paradigm to be more amenable to Bayesian cue combination analyses while still requiring reorientation in an allocentric (i.e., world-based, not egocentric) frame. Twelve adults and 20 children at ages 5 to 7 years old were asked to recall locations in a virtual environment after a disorientation. Results were not consistent with adaptive combination. Instead, they are consistent with the use of the most useful (nearest) single landmark in isolation. We term this adaptive selection. Experiment 2 suggests that adults also use the adaptive selection method when they are not disoriented but are still required to use a local allocentric frame. This suggests that the process of recalling a location in the allocentric frame is typically guided by the single most useful landmark rather than a Bayesian combination of landmarks. These results illustrate that there can be important limits to Bayesian theories of the cognition, particularly for complex tasks such as allocentric recall. Public Significance Statement Whether studying the development of children’s spatial cognition, creating artificial intelligence with human-like capacities, or designing civic spaces, we can benefit from a strong understanding of how humans process the space around them. Here we tested a prominent theory that brings together statistical theory and psychological theory (Bayesian models of perception and memory) but found that it could not satisfactorily explain our data. Our findings suggest that when tracking the spatial relations between objects from different viewpoints, rather than efficiently combining all the available landmarks, people often fall back to the much simpler method of tracking the spatial relation to the nearest landmark.

SUBMITTER: Negen J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8582329 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature