The path more travelled: Time pressure increases reliance on familiar route-based strategies during navigation

Wayfinding in pairs: comparing the planning and navigation performance of dyads and individuals in a real-world environment

Navigation is essential to life, and it is cognitively complex, drawing on abilities such as prospective and situated planning, spatial memory, location recognition, and real-time decision-making. In many cases, day-to-day navigation is embedded in a social context where cognition and behavior are shaped by others, but the great majority of existing research in spatial cognition has focused on individuals. The two studies we report here contribute to our understanding of social wayfinding, assessing the performance of paired and individual navigators on a real-world wayfinding task in which they were instructed to minimize time and distance traveled. In the first study, we recruited 30 pairs of friends (familiar dyads); in the second, we recruited 30 solo participants (individuals). We compare the two studies to the results of an earlier study of 30 pairs of strangers (unfamiliar dyads). We draw out differences in performance with respect to spatial, social, and cognitive considerations. Of the three conditions, solo participants were least successful in reaching the destination accurately on their initial attempt. Friends traveled more efficiently than either strangers or individuals. Working with a partner also appeared to lend confidence to wayfinders: dyads of either familiarity type were more persistent than individuals in the navigation task, even after encountering challenges or making incorrect attempts. Route selection was additionally impacted by route complexity and unfamiliarity with the study area. Navigators explicitly used ease of remembering as a planning criterion, and the resulting differences in route complexity likely influenced success during enacted navigation.

Stress affects navigation strategies in immersive virtual reality

There are known individual differences in both the ability to learn the layout of novel environments and the flexibility of strategies for navigating known environments. However, it is unclear how navigational abilities are impacted by high-stress scenarios. Here we used immersive virtual reality (VR) to develop a novel behavioral paradigm to examine navigation under dynamically changing situations. We recruited 48 participants (24 female; ages 17-32) to navigate a virtual maze (7.5 m × 7.5 m). Participants learned the maze by moving along a fixed path past the maze's landmarks (paintings). Subsequently, participants experienced either a non-stress condition, or a high-stress condition tasking them with navigating the maze. In the high-stress condition, their initial path was blocked, the environment was darkened, threatening music was played, fog obstructed more distal views of the environment, and participants were given a time limit of 20 s with a countdown timer displayed at the top of their screen. On trials where the path was blocked, we found self-reported stress levels and distance traveled increased while trial completion rate decreased (as compared to non-stressed control trials). On unblocked stress trials, participants were less likely to take a shortcut and consequently navigated less efficiently compared to control trials. Participants with more trait spatial anxiety reported more stress and navigated less efficiently. Overall, our results suggest that navigational abilities change considerably under high-stress conditions.

Motivation moderates gender differences in navigation performance

Gender differences in navigation performance are a recurrent and controversial topic. Previous research suggests that men outperform women in navigation tasks and that men and women exhibit different navigation strategies. Here, we investigate whether motivation to complete the task moderates the relationship between navigation performance and gender. Participants learned the locations of landmarks in a novel virtual city. During learning, participants could trigger a top-down map that depicted their current position and the locations of the landmarks. During testing, participants were divided into control and treatment groups and were not allowed to consult the map. All participants were given 16 minutes to navigate to the landmarks, but those in the treatment group were monetarily penalized for every second they spent completing the task. Results revealed a negative relationship between physiological arousal and the time required to locate the landmarks. In addition, gender differences in strategy were found during learning, with women spending more time with the map and taking 40% longer than men to locate the landmarks. Interestingly, an interaction between gender and treatment group revealed that women in the control group required more time than men and women in the treatment group to retrieve the landmarks. During testing, women in the control group also took more circuitous routes compared to men in the control group and women in the treatment group. These results suggest that a concurrent and relevant stressor can motivate women to perform similarly to men, helping to diminish pervasive gender differences found in the navigation literature.

Effects of Acute Stress on Rigid Learning, Flexible Learning, and Value-Based Decision-Making in Spatial Navigation

The current study investigated how stress affects value-based decision-making during spatial navigation and different types of learning underlying decisions. Eighty-two adult participants (42 females) first learned to find object locations in a virtual environment from a fixed starting location (rigid learning) and then to find the same objects from unpredictable starting locations (flexible learning). Participants then decided whether to reach goal objects from the fixed or unpredictable starting location. We found that stress impairs rigid learning in females, and it does not impair, and even improves, flexible learning when performance with rigid learning is controlled for. Critically, examining how earlier learning influences subsequent decision-making using computational models, we found that stress reduces memory integration, making participants more likely to focus on recent memory and less likely to integrate information from other sources. Collectively, our results show how stress impacts different memory systems and the communication between memory and decision-making.

Toward an Understanding of Cognitive Mapping Ability Through Manipulations and Measurement of Schemas and Stress

Daily function depends on an ability to mentally map our environment. Environmental factors such as visibility and layout, and internal factors such as psychological stress, can challenge spatial memory and efficient navigation. Importantly, people vary dramatically in their ability to navigate flexibly and overcome such challenges. In this paper, we present an overview of "schema theory" and our view of its relevance to navigational memory research. We review several studies from our group and others, that integrate manipulations of environmental complexity and affective state in order to gain a richer understanding of the mechanisms that underlie individual differences in navigational memory. Our most recent data explicitly link such individual differences to ideas rooted in schema theory, and we discuss the potential for this work to advance our understanding of cognitive decline with aging. The data from this body of work highlight the powerful impacts of individual cognitive traits and affective states on the way people take advantage of environmental features and adopt navigational strategies.

Understanding Differences in Wayfinding Strategies

Navigating to goal locations in a known environment (wayfinding) can be accomplished by different strategies, notably by taking habitual, well-learned routes (response strategy) or by inferring novel paths, such as shortcuts, from spatial knowledge of the environment's layout (place strategy). Human and animal neuroscience studies reveal that these strategies reflect different brain systems, with response strategies relying more on activation of the striatum and place strategies associated with activation of the hippocampus. In addition to individual differences in strategy, recent behavioral studies show sex differences such that men use place strategies more than women, and age differences such that older adults use more response strategies than younger adults. This paper takes a comprehensive multilevel approach to understanding these differences, characterizing wayfinding as a complex information processing task. This analysis reveals factors that affect navigation strategy, including availability of the relevant type of environmental knowledge, momentary access to this knowledge, trade-offs between physical and mental effort in different navigation contexts, and risk taking. We consider how strategies are influenced by the computational demands of a navigation task and by factors that affect the neural circuits underlying navigation. We also discuss limitations of laboratory studies to date and outline priorities for future research, including relating wayfinding strategies to independent measures of spatial knowledge, and studying wayfinding strategies in naturalistic environments.

Building a Cognitive Science of Human Variation: Individual Differences in Spatial Navigation

The aim of this issue is to take stock of cognitive science of human variation in the field of spatial navigation, an important domain in which debates have often assumed an invariant human mind. Addressing the challenge of individual differences requires cognitive scientists to change their practices in several ways. First, we need to consider how to design measures and paradigms that have adequate psychometric characteristics. Second, using reliable, efficient, and valid measures, we need to examine how people vary from time to time, both in the short run due to emotions, such as stress or time pressure, and in the longer run, due to training or living in physical environments that require wayfinding skills. Third, we need to study people different from the traditional college participants, including variations in age, gender, education, culture, physical environment, and possible interactions among these variables.

On the proposed role of metacognition in environment learning: recommendations for research

Metacognition plays a role in environment learning (EL). When navigating, we monitor environment information to judge our likelihood to remember our way, and we engage in control by using tools to prevent getting lost. Yet, the relationship between metacognition and EL is understudied. In this paper, we examine the possibility of leveraging metacognition to support EL. However, traditional metacognitive theories and methodologies were not developed with EL in mind. Here, we use traditional metacognitive theories and approaches as a foundation for a new examination of metacognition in EL. We highlight three critical considerations about EL. Namely: (1) EL is a complex process that unfolds sequentially and is thereby enriched with multiple different types of cues, (2) EL is inherently driven by a series of ecologically relevant motivations and constraints, and (3) monitoring and control interact to support EL. In doing so, we describe how task demands and learning motivations inherent to EL should shape how metacognition is explored. With these considerations, we provide three methodological recommendations for investigating metacognition during EL. Specifically, researchers should: (1) instantiate EL goals to impact learning, metacognition, and retrieval processes, (2) prompt learners to make frequent metacognitive judgments and consider metacognitive accuracy as a primary performance metric, and (3) incorporate insights from both transfer appropriate processing and monitoring hypotheses when designing EL assessments. In summary, to effectively investigate how metacognition impacts EL, both ecological and methodological considerations need to be weighed.

Stress-induced HPA activation in virtual navigation and spatial attention performance

Background

Previous research has shown that spatial performance (e.g. navigation, visuospatial memory, attention) can be influenced by acute stress; however, studies have produced mixed findings sometimes showing an improvement after stress, other times showing impairment or no overall effect. Some of these discrepancies may be related to: the type of stress system activated by the stressor (sympathetic adrenal medulla [SAM] or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical [HPA]); whether cortisol responders vs. nonresponders are analyzed subsequent to main effects; and sex differences in stress responses. In the present study, we examine the influence of HPA activation from an acute laboratory stressor (Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor test [SECPT]) on performance during two spatial tasks: Useful Field of View (UFOV; a measure of spatial attention) and virtual reality (VR) navigation. We assigned 31 males and 30 females to either the SECPT or a Non-Stress condition prior to the two spatial tasks. Cardiovascular measures including heart rate and blood pressure, and salivary cortisol biosamples were obtained at specific time points.

Results

Participants in the Stress condition showed increases in heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure indicating sympathetic adrenal medulla (SAM) axis activation. Stress also led to increases in salivary cortisol, suggesting hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) activation. Stress did not influence overall performance in the spatial attention UFOV or the VR navigation task. However, a sex difference in spatial attention was detected when participants were divided into Stress-cortisol responders and non-responders in the UFOV task. Male Stress-cortisol responders (n = 9) showed better UFOV accuracy than female Stress-cortisol responders (n = 6); no sex differences were found among the Non-Stress control group. Furthermore, for females in the stress condition (n = 14), higher cortisol responses were associated with lower spatial attention performance.

Conclusions

Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor stress resulted in no change in speed or accuracy in a VR navigation task. For the spatial attention task, the SECPT led to a sex difference among Stress-cortisol responders with males showing improved accuracy over females. The relationship between HPA activation and prefrontal cortex activity may be necessary to understand sex differences in spatial attention performance.

Mother bats facilitate pup navigation learning

Learning where to forage and how to navigate to foraging sites are among the most essential skills that infants must acquire. How they do so is poorly understood. Numerous bat species carry their young in flight while foraging. This behavior is costly, and the benefits for the offspring are not fully clear. Using GPS tracking of both mothers and bat pups, we documented the pups' ontogeny from being non-volant to foraging independently. Our results suggest that mothers facilitate learning of navigation, assisting their pups with future foraging, by repeatedly placing them on specific trees and by behaving in a manner that seemed to encourage learning. Once independent, pups first flew alone to the same sites that they were carried to by their mothers, following similar routes used by their mothers, after which they began exploring new sites. Notably, in our observations, pups never independently followed their mothers in flight but were always carried by them, suggesting that learning occurred while passively being transported upside down.

Stress Disrupts Human Hippocampal-Prefrontal Function during Prospective Spatial Navigation and Hinders Flexible Behavior

The ability to anticipate and flexibly plan for the future is critical for achieving goal-directed outcomes. Extant data suggest that neural and cognitive stress mechanisms may disrupt memory retrieval and restrict prospective planning, with deleterious impacts on behavior. Here, we examined whether and how acute psychological stress influences goal-directed navigational planning and efficient, flexible behavior. Our methods combined fMRI, neuroendocrinology, and machine learning with a virtual navigation planning task. Human participants were trained to navigate familiar paths in virtual environments and then (concurrent with fMRI) performed a planning and navigation task that could be most efficiently solved by taking novel shortcut paths. Strikingly, relative to non-stressed control participants, participants who performed the planning task under experimentally induced acute psychological stress demonstrated (1) disrupted neural activity critical for mnemonic retrieval and mental simulation and (2) reduced traversal of shortcuts and greater reliance on familiar paths. These neural and behavioral changes under psychological stress were tied to evidence for disrupted neural replay of memory for future locations in the spatial environment, providing mechanistic insight into why and how stress can alter planning and foster inefficient behavior.

The formation and use of hierarchical cognitive maps in the brain: A neural network model

Many researchers have tried to model how environmental knowledge is learned by the brain and used in the form of cognitive maps. However, previous work was limited in various important ways: there was little consensus on how these cognitive maps were formed and represented, the planning mechanism was inherently limited to performing relatively simple tasks, and there was little consideration of how these mechanisms would scale up. This paper makes several significant advances. Firstly, the planning mechanism used by the majority of previous work propagates a decaying signal through the network to create a gradient that points towards the goal. However, this decaying signal limited the scale and complexity of tasks that can be solved in this manner. Here we propose several ways in which a network can can self-organize a novel planning mechanism that does not require decaying activity. We also extend this model with a hierarchical planning mechanism: a layer of cells that identify frequently-used sequences of actions and reuse them to significantly increase the efficiency of planning. We speculate that our results may explain the apparent ability of humans and animals to perform model-based planning on both small and large scales without a noticeable loss of efficiency.

Lost in Time and Space: States of High Arousal Disrupt Implicit Acquisition of Spatial and Sequential Context Information

Biased cognition during high arousal states is a relevant phenomenon in a variety of topics: from the development of post-traumatic stress disorders or stress-triggered addictive behaviors to forensic considerations regarding crimes of passion. Recent evidence indicates that arousal modulates the engagement of a hippocampus-based "cognitive" system in favor of a striatum-based "habit" system in learning and memory, promoting a switch from flexible, contextualized to more rigid, reflexive responses. Existing findings appear inconsistent, therefore it is unclear whether and which type of context processing is disrupted by enhanced arousal. In this behavioral study, we investigated such arousal-triggered cognitive-state shifts in human subjects. We validated an arousal induction procedure (three experimental conditions: violent scene, erotic scene, neutral control scene) using pupillometry (Preliminary Experiment, n = 13) and randomly administered this method to healthy young adults to examine whether high arousal states affect performance in two core domains of contextual processing, the acquisition of spatial (spatial discrimination paradigm; Experiment 1, n = 66) and sequence information (learned irrelevance paradigm; Experiment 2, n = 84). In both paradigms, spatial location and sequences were encoded incidentally and both displacements when retrieving spatial position as well as the predictability of the target by a cue in sequence learning changed stepwise. Results showed that both implicit spatial and sequence learning were disrupted during high arousal states, regardless of valence. Compared to the control group, participants in the arousal conditions showed impaired discrimination of spatial positions and abolished learning of associative sequences. Furthermore, Bayesian analyses revealed evidence against the null models. In line with recent models of stress effects on cognition, both experiments provide evidence for decreased engagement of flexible, cognitive systems supporting encoding of context information in active cognition during acute arousal, promoting reduced sensitivity for contextual details. We argue that arousal fosters cognitive adaptation towards less demanding, more present-oriented information processing, which prioritizes a current behavioral response set at the cost of contextual cues. This transient state of behavioral perseverance might reduce reliance on context information in unpredictable environments and thus represent an adaptive response in certain situations.

Let me be your guide: physical guidance improves spatial learning for older adults with simulated low vision

Monitoring one's safety during low vision navigation demands limited attentional resources which may impair spatial learning of the environment. In studies of younger adults, we have shown that these mobility monitoring demands can be alleviated, and spatial learning subsequently improved, via the presence of a physical guide during navigation. The present study extends work with younger adults to an older adult sample with simulated low vision. We test the effect of physical guidance on improving spatial learning as well as general age-related changes in navigation ability. Participants walked with and without a physical guide on novel real-world paths in an indoor environment and pointed to remembered target locations. They completed concurrent measures of cognitive load on the trials. Results demonstrate an improvement in learning under low vision conditions with a guide compared to walking without a guide. However, our measure of cognitive load did not vary between guidance conditions. We also conducted a cross-age comparison and found support for age-related declines in spatial learning generally and greater effects of physical guidance with increasing age.