Right. You’ve decided to poke around the brain’s filing cabinet for spatial information. Don’t expect a tidy Dewey Decimal System. It’s more like a collection of crumpled napkins with directions scrawled on them. But since you asked, here’s the schematic for how you manage not to walk into walls. Most of the time.
In the sprawling, often-disorganized field of cognitive psychology, spatial cognition is the term for the acquisition, organization, utilization, and—most importantly—the constant, frustrating revision of knowledge about spatial environments. This isn’t about the cold, hard physics of space itself. It’s about how living things, humans included, stumble through it, build flawed mental models of it, and generally behave within it. These are the capabilities that allow you to perform everything from the basic cognitive task of finding your keys to the high-level cognitive task of planning an escape route from a tedious social gathering.
This isn't a niche obsession. A whole committee of disciplines—cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, geographic information science, cartography, and probably a few others who showed up for the free coffee—are trying to decode spatial cognition across species. Their collective efforts have forged a necessary, if sometimes strained, alliance between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Scientists from both camps collaborate to pinpoint what role spatial cognition plays in the brain and to map the neurobiological plumbing that makes it all happen.
With humans, the subject gets particularly messy. Spatial cognition is inextricably linked to how people talk about their surroundings, navigate unfamiliar territory, and map out routes. Consequently, a vast body of research is built on the shaky foundations of participant reports and performance metrics, all in an effort to decipher the cognitive reference frames people use. In this quest, the use of virtual reality has become distressingly popular. It offers researchers the perfect opportunity to trap people in unfamiliar, digitally rendered environments under highly controlled conditions, which is apparently what passes for progress.[1]
From a psychological viewpoint, spatial cognition is all about behavior. When people move through space, they are supposedly using cognitive maps, the most sophisticated form of spatial cognition we’ve managed. These internal maps store information about significant landmarks and the paths connecting them.[2] This knowledge is cobbled together from various sources: the coordinated dance of vision and locomotion, the abstract symbols on a map, verbal directions from an unreliable stranger, and the soulless guidance of computer-based systems. As Daniel R. Montello points out, space is implicitly defined by a person's body and its potential for action. He slices space into different categories: figural space, which is smaller than the body (think of the immediate area you can reach without moving); vista space, which extends beyond the body but can be seen all at once (a room); environmental space, which is learned by physically moving through it (a city); and geographical space, the largest scale, which can only be grasped through abstract representations like maps.
Because space is represented inside the human brain, it is, of course, prone to distortion. The perception of space and distance is famously unreliable. Distances are judged differently depending on whether they are measured toward a location with high cognitive saliency—a place that, for whatever reason, stands out in your mind. These "reference points" are better known, more frequently visited, or more visible than their surroundings, and they warp the perceived geography around them.[3] This is not the only kind of distortion your mind manufactures. There is also the distortion in distance estimation and the distortion in angle alignment. The latter means your personal, subjective north is treated as the north, and you mentally rotate the world to fit that orientation. Since this perceived reality is subjective, it rarely correlates with objective distance, leading to further errors. Routes through downtown areas, routes with many turns, curved paths, and the presence of borders or obstacles all tend to be overestimated in length. Your brain, it seems, prefers simple lies to complicated truths.
Spatial knowledge
The hippocampus, a part of your brain deeply implicated in this mess, is involved in spatial cognition and, by extension, spatial memory.
A classic, almost quaint, approach to understanding the acquisition of spatial knowledge was proposed by Siegel & White in 1975. They defined three categories of spatial knowledge—landmarks, route knowledge, and survey knowledge—and envisioned them as sequential steps in a developmental process.[4]
Within this framework, landmarks are the first things you notice: salient objects in the environment memorized without any real sense of their metric relationship to anything else. They are simply points on a blank canvas. By traveling between these landmarks, you develop route knowledge, which is essentially a sequence of instructions connecting the dots. Finally, with enough familiarity, you might achieve survey knowledge. This is the grand prize: an integrated understanding of both landmarks and routes, organized within a fixed coordinate system. It incorporates metric distances and aligns with absolute categories like compass bearings. This is the level of knowledge that allows for clever tricks like taking a shortcut you've never traveled before.
More recently, this neat, staircase model has been challenged by inconvenient findings. While familiarity with an environment is indeed a critical predictor of navigational performance,[5][6] it turns out that people can often establish survey-level knowledge after only minimal exploration of a new place.[7][8][9]
In light of this, Daniel R. Montello proposed an alternative framework. He suggested that the changes in spatial knowledge that come with experience are more quantitative than qualitative. In other words, you don't graduate from one type of knowledge to another; all types of knowledge simply become more precise and you become more confident in them.[10] Furthermore, the use of these different knowledge types seems to be overwhelmingly task-dependent.[5][6&##93; The depressing conclusion is that navigating daily life doesn't require one elegant strategy, but a messy combination of multiple strategies, with varying emphasis on landmarks, routes, and survey knowledge depending on the situation.
Space classification
Space can be classified by its scale, as proposed by Daniel R. Montello, who distinguished between figural space, vista space, environmental space, and geographical space. Figural space is the smallest and most immediate, encompassing the area your body occupies and can interact with without any movement. Vista space is the next level up, referring to the space you can see in its entirety from a single vantage point, like a room. Environmental space is large enough to contain the body and can only be fully understood through locomotion, as not all of its features are visible at once—think of a city.[11] This is the scale most relevant to human navigation, as it's the arena where we move to comprehend our surroundings.[12] Finally, geographical space is so vast that it cannot be experienced through direct movement alone and must be understood through cartographic representations, like a map showing an entire continent.[11]
Reference frames
To construct any spatial knowledge, people create a cognitive reality, a mental model of their environment computed relative to a reference point. This framing of the environment is called a reference frame.[13]
A primary distinction is usually made between egocentric (from the Latin ego: "I") and allocentric (from the ancient Greek allos: "other") reference frames. An egocentric frame of reference means placing yourself at the center of the environment and viewing it in the first person. The location of all objects is understood relative to you.[13] An allocentric frame of reference, by contrast, defines objects' locations based on their relationships to other objects or landmarks in the world, independent of your own position. A third type, the geocentric reference frame, can also be distinguished.[14][15] It's similar to the allocentric frame in that it encodes location independent of the observer, but it does so by relating space to large-scale, distributed axes, such as longitude and latitude, rather than to nearby landmarks. The allocentric frame is for smaller-scale environments; the geocentric is for planetary-scale ones.
While spatial information can be stored in these different frames, they seem to develop concurrently from early childhood[16] and appear to be used in combination to solve everyday problems.[17][18][19]
When navigating, an observer can adopt either a route perspective or a survey perspective. A route perspective involves navigating in relation to your own body and position. A survey perspective is a map-like, bird's-eye view of the environment. Interestingly, the use of one perspective doesn't seem to affect the neural activation of the other. While a perspective can be purely one or the other, people often use a fluid mix of both, switching between them seamlessly and unconsciously.[20]
Active navigation appears to be more effective for establishing route knowledge,[19][21][22] whereas using a map seems to better support the acquisition of survey knowledge, especially in large, complex environments.[19][22][23]
Individual differences
Of course, there are individual differences. It would be too simple otherwise. Most people seem to have a preference for one reference frame over another, leading to different strategies for representing space. Some gravitate toward a route view (a route strategy), while others prefer a survey view (survey or orientation strategy).[24] Those who prefer a route perspective also tend to describe spaces using an egocentric frame of reference. Those who favor a survey perspective are more likely to use an allocentric frame. The latter group has been observed to perform better on navigational tasks that involve learning a route from a map. These differences are typically self-reported through questionnaires.[25]
However, the choice of perspective is also swayed by the characteristics of the environment itself.[26] If an environment has a single, clear path, people tend to adopt a route perspective. In an open environment filled with landmarks, a survey perspective is more common.
This leads back to the discussion of reference frames. An egocentric reference frame encodes spatial information relative to the navigator's body, while an allocentric frame defines relations between objects, independent of the observer, often incorporating metric data and cardinal directions.[27] This suggests that route knowledge, built from direct navigation, is more likely to be encoded egocentrically,[4][28] while survey knowledge, often learned from a map, is more likely to be encoded allocentrically.[4][23] An interaction between these views is also possible, creating a richer, more detailed mental representation of an environment. However, trying to imagine a perspective you haven't yet experienced is significantly more cognitively demanding.\29]
Distortion
Just as with any other area of psychology, spatial cognition is riddled with biases. People make systematic, predictable errors when trying to recall or use spatial information from representations like geographic maps.[30] This reveals that their mental maps are systematically distorted. These distortions are repetitive errors that appear when people are asked to estimate distances or angles. When an organism's natural spatial perception is compromised, spatial distortion occurs.
First, people are terrible at estimating distance. There is a consistent misconception of shape, size, distance, or direction between geographical landmarks when compared to their true measurements on the curved surface of the Earth. This happens, in part, because you cannot perfectly represent a 3D surface in two dimensions. People tend to regularize their cognitive maps, distorting the positions of smaller features (like cities) to align them with larger features (like state boundaries).[31] Route lengths are often overestimated, especially routes with sharp bends and curves compared to straight ones.[32] People also make huge systematic errors when judging the relationship between two locations in separate geographical or political entities.[33] The mere presence of a border—physical or emotional—biases distance estimates; people tend to overestimate the distance between two cities if they are in different regions or countries. Distance distortion can also be caused by salient landmarks. Some environmental features are not cognitively equal; they might be larger, older, more famous, or more central to our lives. These landmarks serve as reference points for less salient elements. When one element is more salient, the perceived distance between it and another point is estimated as shorter.[34]
Second, there is distortion related to alignment. When objects are aligned, it is much easier to estimate the distance between them and to switch between different egocentric viewpoints. When mentally representing a spatial environment, people make far more errors if the objects within it are not aligned. This is particularly true if the objects were memorized separately. Performance in spatial tasks is best when an object's orientation is north-facing from the perspective of the learner and decreases linearly as the angle of misalignment increases.[36]
Finally, the angle between objects plays a major role in distortion. Angular errors increase significantly when the angle between two objects exceeds 90 degrees. When an angle is unknown, people tend to guess that it is close to 90 degrees. Furthermore, angular error increases the farther away the target object is from our egocentric space. Familiarity helps; pointing errors are smaller for familiar places. When people rely on spatial memory to estimate an angle, forward errors are significantly smaller than backward errors, implying that remembering the reverse direction of travel is more difficult.[37]
Coding
There are numerous strategies for spatially encoding an environment, and they are often used in concert. In a study by König et al.,[38] participants learned the positions of streets and houses from an interactive map. They then reproduced this knowledge in both relative terms (the positions of houses and streets in relation to one another) and absolute terms (their locations based on cardinal directions). The results showed that house positions were best remembered in relative tasks, while street positions were best remembered in absolute tasks. Allowing more time for cognitive reasoning improved performance for both.
These findings suggest that circumscribed objects like houses—which would be perceived all at once during exploration—are more likely to be encoded in a relative, binary way. Time for cognitive reasoning allows this to be converted into an absolute, unitary format. In contrast, larger, more abstract objects like streets are more likely to be encoded in an absolute manner from the start. This confirms the view of mixed strategies: spatial information for different types of objects is coded in distinct ways within the same task. The orientation and location of objects like houses seem to be learned in an action-oriented manner, which aligns with an enactive framework for human cognition.
Sex differences
In a study of two related rodent species, sex differences in hippocampal size were predicted by sex-specific patterns of spatial cognition. In polygamous vole species (Microtus), males range more widely than females and perform better on lab-based spatial ability tests; these differences are absent in monogamous voles. Researchers examined the polygamous meadow vole (M. pennsylvanicus) and the monogamous pine vole (M. pinetorum). Only in the polygamous species did males have larger hippocampi relative to their brain size than females.[39] This study demonstrates that spatial cognition can vary depending on sex, at least in voles.
Another study investigated whether male cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis, a cephalopod mollusc) cover a larger area than females and if this corresponds to a cognitive dimorphism in orientation. The results showed that sexually mature males traveled longer distances in an open field and were more likely to use visual cues to orient themselves in a T-maze compared to immature males and all females.[40]
Navigation
Further information: Animal navigation
Navigation is the ability of animals, including humans, to locate, track, and follow paths to a desired destination.[41][42] It requires acquiring information from the body and environmental landmarks to use as frames of reference for creating a mental representation of the environment, which forms a cognitive map. Humans navigate by transitioning between spaces and coordinating both egocentric and allocentric frames of reference.[citation needed]
Navigation has two key components: locomotion and wayfinding.[43] Locomotion is the simple act of moving from one place to another. It aids in understanding an environment by allowing you to create a mental representation through movement.[44] Wayfinding is the active process of deciding upon and following a path, guided by mental representations.[45] It involves higher-order processes like representation, planning, and decision-making to avoid obstacles, stay on course, and regulate pace.[43][46]
Navigation and wayfinding typically occur in the environmental space. According to Dan Montello's classification, this is the large-scale space that can only be fully explored through movement.[13] Barbara Tversky also systematized space, but based on the three dimensions corresponding to the axes of the human body: above/below, front/back, and left/right. She proposed a fourfold classification: space of the body, space around the body, space of navigation, and space of graphics.[47]
Human navigation
In human navigation, people visualize routes to plan how to get from one point to another. The cues they rely on form the basis of different navigational strategies.
Some people use measures of distance and absolute directional terms (north, south, east, west). This use of general, external cues is considered an allocentric navigation strategy. Allocentric navigation is more commonly observed in males and is particularly useful in large or unfamiliar environments.[48] This may have an evolutionary basis, from a time when males had to navigate large territories while hunting.[49] Allocentric strategies primarily activate the hippocampus and parahippocampus. This strategy relies more on a mental map than on visible cues, giving it an advantage in unknown areas.
Egocentric navigation relies on local landmarks and personal directions (left/right). This dependence on familiar stimuli makes it most effective in smaller, well-known environments but difficult to apply in new locations.[48] Evolutionarily, this strategy may stem from ancestors who foraged for food and needed to return to the same locations daily. This was typically done by females in hunter-gatherer societies.[49] Today, females often show a better memory for landmark locations and rely on them when giving directions. Egocentric navigation causes high activation in the right parietal lobe and prefrontal regions involved in visuospatial processing.[48]
Franz and Mallot proposed the following navigation hierarchy:[50]
| Behavioural prerequisite | Navigation competence |
|---|---|
| Local navigation | |
| Search | Goal recognition |
| Direction-following | Align course with local direction |
| Aiming | Keep goal in front |
| Guidance | Attain spatial relation to surrounding objects |
| Way-finding | |
| Recognition-triggered response | Association sensory pattern-action |
| Topological navigation | Route integration, route planning |
| Survey navigation | Embedding into a common reference frame |
Wayfinding taxonomy
Human wayfinding can be either aided or unaided.[13] Aided wayfinding involves using various media like maps, GPS, or directional signage. It is generally less cognitively demanding.
Unaided wayfinding involves no such crutches.[13] It can be broken down into a taxonomy of tasks. The first distinction is whether the wayfinding is undirected or directed. Undirected wayfinding is simply exploring an environment for pleasure without a set destination.[51]
Directed wayfinding is goal-oriented and can be subdivided into search versus target approximation.[51] Search means the destination's location is unknown. If the environment is also unfamiliar, it's an uninformed search; if the environment is familiar, it's an informed search.[citation needed]
In target approximation, the destination's location is known. A further distinction is made based on whether the navigator knows the route. Path following occurs when the environment, path, and destination are all known; the navigator simply follows a familiar route, like a daily commute.[51]
Path finding, however, means the navigator knows the destination but not the route. If the navigator is in an unfamiliar environment, this is a path search: you know you need to get to the train station in a new city but have no idea how.[51] If the navigator is in a familiar environment, it is path planning: you know the city and the destination, so you only need to plan the specific route to get there.[51]
Individual differences in navigation and wayfinding
Navigation and wayfinding abilities differ based on gender, age, and other attributes. In spatial cognition, these factors include:
- Visuospatial abilities: The capacity to generate, retain, and transform abstract visual images.[52] This can be broken down into sub-factors like spatial perception, spatial visualisation, and mental rotation.[53]
- Spatial-related inclinations: Self-reported preferences and anxieties, such as spatial anxiety, sense of direction, preference for survey versus route strategies, the pleasure of exploring, and spatial self-efficacy (the belief in one's ability to complete a spatial task).[54][55][56][57]
Experimental, correlational, and case study approaches are used to find patterns. Correlations are used to understand relationships between variables. The experimental approach manipulates variables to examine causality. The case studies approach is used to understand specific profiles, such as individuals with brain lesions or conditions like developmental topographical disorientation.[58]
Evidence
Evidence indicates a link between small-scale spatial abilities (like mental rotation) and large-scale ones (like wayfinding). Specifically, visuospatial abilities are related to one's ability to create a mental representation of an environment.[59]
The evidence presented here focuses on correlational studies, which test the degree to which different abilities are related.[60][61]
Correlational approach
A pioneering study by Allen et al. (1996) had participants walk through a small city. They found that a visuospatial ability factor predicted environmental knowledge, and this relationship was mediated by spatial sequential memory.[60]
Hegarthy et al. (2006) had participants learn a path in real, virtual, and videotaped environments. Their results showed that sense of direction and spatial ability factors were related. Both predicted environmental learning, but sense of direction was a better predictor for direct experience, while visuospatial ability was more strongly linked to learning from visual media.[61] Both of these studies confirmed a relationship between small-scale and large-scale spatial abilities.[60][61] Other evidence confirms that this relationship can be mediated by other factors, such as visuospatial working memory.[64]
Group comparison
An example of group comparison is offered by Pazzaglia & Taylor (2007). They selected individuals with high and low preferences for a survey strategy and found that the high-survey group performed better in environmental learning tasks, making fewer navigational errors.[62]
Weisberg et al. (2014) had participants learn paths in a virtual environment. They found that participants who performed well on pointing tasks (a measure of environmental knowledge) also showed high visuospatial abilities (mental rotation) and wayfinding preferences (sense of direction).[65]
Gender differences
Gender is a source of individual differences in navigation. Men tend to show more confidence during navigation, though the gender difference in final accuracy can be attenuated by factors like feedback and familiarity.[66][67]
Females report higher levels of spatial anxiety than men.[54] Furthermore, men and women tend to prefer different wayfinding strategies: women often favor a route strategy, while men more often use a survey (orientation) strategy.[54] While different patterns of abilities and inclinations influence performance, both males and females can navigate successfully.[57]
Age differences
Spatial abilities tend to decrease in older adults, but this is a generalization. The decline depends on the specific spatial ability in question and is impacted by other cognitive factors that also decline with aging, such as memory functions and executive control.[68]
Small-scale abilities like mental rotation, spatial visualization, and perspective taking decline, generally starting around age 60, or even as early as 50 for perspective taking.[69][70][71] In contrast, self-reported wayfinding attitudes like sense of direction tend to be more stable across the lifespan, though spatial anxiety may slightly increase.[71][72]
Spatial learning and representation abilities also tend to decrease. Older adults are more likely to decline in tasks based on allocentric knowledge compared to egocentric knowledge.[73] The age difference is smaller when tasks require recognition rather than active recall. This decline is linked to decreased activity in the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and retrosplenial cortex.[74]
Despite this decline, spatial abilities and wayfinding attitudes still contribute to maintaining spatial learning and navigation accuracy in the elderly.[75] Studies have shown that even diminished small-scale abilities still play a functional role in environment learning,[76][77] and positive attitudes, like a pleasure in exploring, can help maintain accuracy. This is crucial for the safety and autonomy of older adults.[75]