"Location and Transformation" skills are critical tools for navigating the world and establishing foundational steps for geometric reasoning associated with co-ordinate grids and the Cartesian plane. The contextual nature of using local landmarks to understand students' mental representation of large-scale space has the potential to…

When people navigate, they use strategies dependent on one of two memory systems. The hippocampus-based spatial strategy consists of using multiple landmarks to create a cognitive map of the environment. In contrast, the caudate nucleus-based response strategy is based on the memorization of a series of turns. Importantly, response learners…

We investigated how humans encode large-scale spatial environments using a virtual taxi game. We hypothesized that if 2 connected neighborhoods are explored jointly, people will form a single integrated spatial representation of the town. However, if the neighborhoods are first learned separately and later observed to be connected, people will…

The ability to navigate in a familiar environment depends on both an intact mental representation of allocentric spatial information and the integrity of systems supporting complementary egocentric representations. Although the hippocampus has been implicated in learning new allocentric spatial information, converging evidence suggests that the…