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Spatial Orientation

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior

Synonyms

Navigation; Spatial abilities; Spatial learning and memory; Visuospatial memory

Definition

Spatial orientation refers to the ability of organisms to navigate. It is essential for their survival.

Background

While navigating, we become familiar with an environment and acquire knowledge about it, thereby extracting information from it and storing this information in our memory so that we can recall it later for a variety of purposes (Ekstrom et al. 2018). Examples concerning rodents and humans will be presented since there is an important parallelism between them when dealing with spatial tasks. However, most of the examples will focus on how males and females differ when solving these tasks – on something that has recently been referred to as “qualitative” sex differences – thus counteracting the unjustified practice of ignoring females for so many years in psychological and biomedical research (for a review see Beery and Zucker 2011). To understand the sexually dimorphic...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, Institute of Neurosciences, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Victoria D. Chamizo

  2. CCiTUB, Animal Research Unit of Psychology, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Teresa Rodrigo

Authors
  1. Victoria D. Chamizo
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  2. Teresa Rodrigo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Victoria D. Chamizo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University , Rochester, MI, USA

    Jennifer Vonk

  2. Department of Psychology, Oakland University Department of Psychology, Rochester, MI, USA

    Todd Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Khalil Iskarous

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Chamizo, V.D., Rodrigo, T. (2019). Spatial Orientation. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1416-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1416-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6

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