Affective States Influence Spatial Cue Utilization during Navigation

Abstract

Humans navigate complex environments effectively by identifying and monitoring environmental spatial cues (i.e., landmarks). Previous research has shown that affective states modulate cue utilization, attentional focus, and memory. Like other human behaviors, navigation is performed within an affective context and thus may fall under its influence. The present study examines the influence of affective state on cue utilization in novel virtual environments. Employing a within-participants factorial design, we manipulated participants' affect, crossing valence (happy, sad) and arousal (high, low), with available cue type (global cues: present, absent; and local cues: present, absent) within a desktop virtual environment. Results indicated that low relative to high arousal states promote global cue utilization during navigation through novel environments; there were no effects of affective valence. Arousal effects decreased with environmental familiarity, indicating its influence on cue utilization during the initial learning of novel environments. The results are discussed with regard to theories of affect, spatial cognition, and navigation.

How Navigational Aids Impair Spatial Memory: Evidence for Divided Attention

“…Higher values indicate greater efficiency. Previous research using this software has demonstrated that path efficiency is a reliable measure of navigational efficiency (Brunyé, Gardony, Mahoney, & Taylor, 2012;Gardony, Brunyé, Mahoney, & Taylor, 2011).…”

Caffeine Promotes Global Spatial Processing in Habitual and Non-Habitual Caffeine Consumers

“…A number of studies have suggested that encoding of spatial information is an automatic rather than effortful process (Hasher and Zacks, 1979; Ellis, 1990; Andrade and Meudell, 1993) and thus unlikely to be influenced by arousal states; other studies, however suggest the opposite (Light and Zelinski, 1983; Arbuckle et al, 1994; Kessels et al, 2005). Indeed a growing body of evidence suggests that the ability to accurately process and mentally represent spatial information is contingent upon several factors such as goals, affective states, working memory load, and strategies (McNamara et al, 1992; Taylor et al, 1999; Waller, 2000; Hegarty et al, 2006; Brunye and Taylor, 2008; Maddox et al, 2008; Brunyé et al, 2009; Gyselinck et al, 2009; Meneghetti et al, 2009; Gardony et al, 2011). Thus, a number of studies suggest that there is limited automaticity to the encoding of spatial location information, although it may be processed less effortfully than some other types of information (Thomas et al, 2012).…”

The acquisition of survey knowledge for local and global landmark configurations under time pressure

“…Second, we examined whether the mere presence of global landmarks supports survey knowledge acquisition for local landmarks. We hypothesized that the presence of global landmarks would facilitate survey knowledge acquisition for local landmarks, but only in the no time pressure group (i.e, attentional narrowing; Gardony et al, 2011). In the following, we will discuss the results, limitations, and implications of the present experiment individually for the two main research questions.…”

“…For example, Gardony and colleagues (2011) demonstrated that high arousal states can influence the use of near and far landmarks for navigation in virtual reality. In their study, participants in low arousal states used distant landmarks (i.e., in the spatial periphery) more efficiently for navigation than participants in high arousal states (Gardony et al, 2011).…”

“…The present study examined stress effects on learning the relations among local landmarks (e.g., a shop along the route) as compared to global landmarks (e.g., a tower in the distance) during an egocentric navigation task. We build on prior empirical findings from the general psychology literature that have indicated an impairment of working memory (e.g., Oei, Everaerd, Elzinga, van Well, & Bermond, 2006) and/or inattention to global landmarks (Gardony et al, 2011) under acute stress exposure. Following these findings, we expect stress to adversely affect survey knowledge acquisition because of the importance of working memory for integrating spatial information over time (Friedman & Waller, 2008;Hegarty, Montello, Richardson, Ishikawa, & Lovelace, 2006;Meilinger, Knauff, & Bülthoff, 2008) and the importance of global anchor points for survey knowledge acquisition (Steck & Mallot, 2000;Li et al, 2014;Li et al, 2016;Schwering et al, 2017).…”