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Different behavioral and learning effects between using boundary and landmark cues during spatial navigation

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Abstract

Boundary and landmark as visual spatial cues exert different effects in human spatial navigation. However, it is unclear that how different contributions between boundary and landmark are during human spatial navigation, and how their learning processes occur. In this study, we addressed these issues by using boundary-based and landmark-based spatial navigation tasks in a large sample of participants. During the task, participants were instructed to learn an object’s location based on boundary or landmark in the learning phase, and then retrieve the object’s location in the testing phase. Firstly, we found significantly lower distance and angular errors, and smaller variability during the boundary-based task than that in the landmark-based task, which suggested that boundary cue might guide more effectively and stably than landmark cue during spatial navigation. Secondly, our results showed that individual’s distance and angular errors declined less across the time in the boundary-based navigation than that in the landmark-based navigation, suggested that the boundary-based learning effect was weaker than the landmark-based learning effect. Finally, we found that boundary-influenced individuals were more proficient in the boundary-based navigation, while landmark-influenced individuals were more proficient in the landmark-based navigation. Together, these findings indicate that boundary has higher effectiveness for guiding but less enhancement for learning than landmark in spatial navigation.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31872786, 31861143039), the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province of China (2020CFB363), the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences(21YJC190005), the Open Research Fund of the Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior (CCNU) (2019A01), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2021XZZX006, CCNU22QN020).

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  1. Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Central China Normal University, Ministry of Education, Wuhan, China

    Xin Hao

  2. School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, 152 Luoyu St, Hongshan District, 430079, Wuhan, China

    Xin Hao, Zhongping Yuan & Shuting Lin

  3. Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Xiangzhen Kong

  4. Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Yiying Song

  5. Department of Psychology & Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Jia Liu

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  1. Xin Hao
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Hao, X., Yuan, Z., Lin, S. et al. Different behavioral and learning effects between using boundary and landmark cues during spatial navigation. Curr Psychol 42, 23301–23312 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03335-0

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