Are allocentric spatial reference frames compatible with theories of Enactivism?

Abstract

Theories of Enactivism propose an action-oriented approach to understand human cognition. So far, however, empirical evidence supporting these theories has been sparse. Here, we investigate whether spatial navigation based on allocentric reference frames that are independent of the observer's physical body can be understood within an action-oriented approach. Therefore, we performed three experiments testing the knowledge of the absolute orientation of houses and streets towards north, the relative orientation of two houses and two streets, respectively, and the location of houses towards each other in a pointing task. Our results demonstrate that under time pressure, the relative orientation of two houses can be retrieved more accurately than the absolute orientation of single houses. With infinite time for cognitive reasoning, the performance of the task using house stimuli increased greatly for the absolute orientation and surpassed the slightly improved performance in the relative orientation task. In contrast, with streets as stimuli participants performed under time pressure better in the absolute orientation task. Overall, pointing from one house to another house yielded the best performance. This suggests, first, that orientation and location information about houses are primarily coded in house-to-house relations, whereas cardinal information is deduced via cognitive reasoning. Second, orientation information for streets is preferentially coded in absolute orientations. Thus, our results suggest that spatial information about house and street orientation is coded differently and that house orientation and location is primarily learned in an action-oriented way, which is in line with an enactive framework for human cognition.

Learning of Spatial Properties of a Large-Scale Virtual City With an Interactive Map

“…However, it is challenging to get differential insights into spatial knowledge that was acquired and is used naturally in everyday navigation in a large-scale environment like ones hometown. A previous study (König et al, 2017) investigated allocentric spatial knowledge retrieval after everyday navigation in the hometown of Osnabrück, Germany. They used photographs of houses and streets as stimuli and tested spatial knowledge of the orientation of houses and streets toward cardinal north, the relative orientation of two houses and two streets, respectively, and relative location of two houses in a pointing task.…”

Embodied Spatial Knowledge Acquisition in Immersive Virtual Reality: Comparison to Map Exploration

“…The opposite pattern was found after map exploration. Previous research, evaluating photographs of real-world houses of the city of Osnabrück after at least one year of living in the city, combining direct experience and cartographic information to get to know the environment (König et al, 2017), found the highest task accuracy in the pointing task as well.…”

“…Please note that none of the subjects of the pilot study is included in the main study and that no subjects of the main study were excluded for reasons of their spatial exploration behavior. The instructions were given by written and verbal explanations using photographs of houses in the city of Osnabrück that were used as stimuli in a previous study (König et al, 2017). Participants then performed a pre-task training with one example of each spatial task in both time conditions to gain a better insight into the actual task requirements.…”

“…The relative orientation task assesses participants' knowledge of the orientation of two houses facing directions relative to each other. The pointing task evaluates participants' knowledge of the location of two houses relative to each other (for a detailed description of the tasks see also (König et al, 2019(König et al, , 2017. All tasks were designed as 2AFC tasks.…”

“…Order of blocks was randomized over subjects. For more detailed information, see König et al (2017König et al ( , 2019.…”