There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

Spatial cognition is a branch of cognitive psychology that studies how people acquire and use knowledge about their environment to determine where they are, how to obtain resources, and how to find their way home. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including neuroscience, cognition, and sociology, have discovered a great deal about how…

Wayfinding is a kind of spatial riddle that people encounter almost daily. Although it has been well documented that wayfinding elements--namely, environmental cues, people and time--significantly influence wayfinding, there has been little work done to examine the effectiveness of those influences. In particular, the notion of wayfindingly…

Since the proposal of Tolman (1948) that mammals form maplike representations of familiar environments, cognitive map theory has been at the core of debates on the fundamental mechanisms of animal learning and memory. Traditional formulations of cognitive map theory emphasize relations between landmarks and between landmarks and goal locations as…

The demand for pervasive access of location-related information (e.g., local traffic, restaurant locations, navigation maps, weather conditions, pollution index, etc.) fosters a tremendous application base of "Location Based Services (LBSs)". Without loss of generality, we model location-related information as "spatial objects" and the accesses…

Three experiments investigated the roles of intrinsic directions of a scene and observer's viewing direction in recognizing the scene. Participants learned the locations of seven objects along an intrinsic direction that was different from their viewing direction and then recognized spatial arrangements of three or six of these objects from…

Research on cognitive modeling of information search and Web navigation emphasizes the importance of "information scent" (the relevance of semantic cues such as link labels and headings to a reader's goal; Pirolli & Card, 1999). This article shows that not only semantic but also structural knowledge is involved in navigating the Web…

The authors describe 3 human spatial navigation experiments that investigate how limitations of perception, memory, uncertainty, and decision strategy affect human spatial navigation performance. To better understand the effect of these variables on human navigation performance, the authors developed an ideal-navigator model for indoor navigation…

The goal of this work is to extend the theoretical understanding of the relationship between hippocampal spatial and memory functions to the level of neurophysiological mechanisms underlying spatial navigation and episodic memory retrieval. The proposed unifying theory describes both phenomena within a unique framework, as based on one and the…