Animals and humans move around to survive and having the ability to navigate this complex environment represents one of the most fundamental cognitive functions. It involves basic, perceptual and memory related processes and spatial navigation, which is significant as it is a multisensory process where information needs to be integrated, this ability can vary in humans. This essay will briefly explain how animals and humans navigate their environment using its geometric properties as landmarks, it will look at cognitive mapping hypothesis and the research that has been undertaken in this area.
An animal or human’s internal representation of their experienced world is known as the cognitive map, mental images of physical locations which humans and animals use to find their way and to aid memory of significant features in the environment. Cognitive mapping is a function of the hippocampus which is connected to the rest of the brain by ways that are ideal for integrating both spatial and nonspatial information. The term was introduced by psychologist E. C. Tolman, (1948) he used the term to explain how rats learned the positions of rewards in a maze.
Tolman wanted to find out how rats navigated and he developed a maze, at a certain point was the reward, food. The first group of rats ran around the maze once a day for seventeen days, without receiving a reward, they took a long time to reach the end of the maze, making many errors. A second group of rats were always rewarded at the end of the maze and these rats ran fast to the reward point making few errors. The third group of rats ran the maze unrewarded for ten days, on the eleventh day they started to be rewarded for completing the maze. There was a dramatic result from the last group, even though they had not been rewarded from the start, they showed reductions in running time and less errors which matched the second group of ‘rewarded from day one’ rats. Cognitive theorists stated that the rats had learned the maze early and never displayed this until a reinforcement was offered, with Tolman stating that rats actively process information rather than operating on a stimulus response (S-R) relationship. This study was significant as it rejected the S-R approaches of behaviorism and placed an importance on the cognitive variables that shape behaviour, showing there was more involved in how a human/animal learns than just S-R response approaches. Tolman was criticised for not considering that the rats could smell the food and was drawn to the right path by their sense of smell and that the study does show evidence of latent learning. The rats that were not rewarded at first and then rewarded after ten days, showed an instant reduction in mistakes and soon matched the rats that had been constantly rewarded, therefore learning quicker as a response as defiantly obtaining a reward.
Ken Cheng (1986) also undertook a study on rats, training rats to work in a working memory model, to search for food in a rectangular shaped box where Cheng had only exposed food at a certain location and once the food was exposed, seventy-five seconds later he released the rat to go search for the food. Cheng found that when there were no other cues, the rats searched mostly in the correct and the diagonal opposite location, which was geometrically equivalent. It was also found that rats can get geometrically equivalent locations confused in the presence of cues, such as panels placed at the corners. Other species like some fish, birds, and monkeys can conjoin geometric and non-geometric information to reorient themselves, migrating birds use a variety of environmental cues for guidance like the smell of the sea or the mountains they pass. Animal psychologists believe that maze behaviour of rats is S-R response connections learning, that the rat is helplessly responding to a succession of external stimuli.
Studies have also been undertaken on how humans geometrically navigate. Animals reorient mostly by the geometry of the surrounding surface layout, as we discovered with Tolman and Cheng’s studies on laboratory rats. One study on how children navigate and reorient themselves showed that humans also use the shape of their environment to navigate, objects we perceive to be stable like walls are used to aid us in geometric navigation. In the study children’s ability to navigate was tested by using a circular chamber of white panels, the room had soundproof walls and in the centre was a rectangular room, four small circular containers were located at the corners of the rectangular room as hiding places for the object (stickers in this study). The child was shown which direction the door was, then blindfolded and spun around several times, then the child was asked to point in the direction of the door, if a child could not point correctly then they were disorientated and moved to the centre of the room and the blindfold removed. The child was then asked to locate the sticker that had been hidden, the results were that the children searched correspondingly at the accurate and geometrically equivalent opposite corners, which shows that disoriented children searched using the geometric information provided. Learmonth, Nadel, and Newcombe (2002) conducted a study with five-year-old children and concluded that the children had failed to conjoin geometric and landmark information in a small room, they used geometric information only, however, succeeded to conjoin both in a large room.
Humans and animals geometrically navigate by providing themselves with a cognitive map of the environment, absorbing stimuli from our surroundings. It is clear from studies that humans and animals use information like wall brightness differently, depending on the duty, however, room shape geometry is used consistently. Both aspects are important, how we build up our cognitive map and then what rewards us to take that learning further aiding us to achieve what we need.