Mechanisms of Spatial Cognition: Behavioral Experiments in Virtual Environments

The study of spatial cognition in psychology and cognitive neuroscience aims at identifying the neural and computational mechanisms underlying spatial behaviors such as homing (returning to the starting point of an excursion),wayfinding,or pointing to invisible targets from memory. As always in the empirical sciences, minimal, or parsimonious explanations are sought that make no unnecessary assumptions about the neural mechanisms or memory formats. One such memory format is the so-called homing vectorla vector pointing from the agent's current position back to the starting point of an excursion. The existence of more complex memory structures called cognitive maps is supported by experiments involving multiple places, routes, and goals.The paper introduces Virtual Reality as a method for studying human spatial cognition, describes two sample experiments, and sketches an overall theory of human spatial memory supported by empirical evidence.