“Taller and Shorter”: Human 3-D Spatial Memory Distorts Familiar Multilevel Buildings

Abstract

Animal experiments report contradictory findings on the presence of a behavioural and neuronal anisotropy exhibited in vertical and horizontal capabilities of spatial orientation and navigation. We performed a pointing experiment in humans on the imagined 3-D direction of the location of various invisible goals that were distributed horizontally and vertically in a familiar multilevel hospital building. The 21 participants were employees who had worked for years in this building. The hypothesis was that comparison of the experimentally determined directions and the true directions would reveal systematic inaccuracy or dimensional anisotropy of the localizations. The study provides first evidence that the internal representation of a familiar multilevel building was distorted compared to the dimensions of the true building: vertically 215% taller and horizontally 51% shorter. This was not only demonstrated in the mathematical reconstruction of the mental model based on the analysis of the pointing experiments but also by the participants’ drawings of the front view and the ground plan of the building. Thus, in the mental model both planes were altered in different directions: compressed for the horizontal floor plane and stretched for the vertical column plane. This could be related to human anisotropic behavioural performance of horizontal and vertical navigation in such buildings.

The place-cell representation of volumetric space in rats

“…However behavioral experiments suggest a subtle difference, with an advantage in memory for horizontal as compared to vertical space 4 . More recent evidence suggests that people wrongly estimate the position of objects in a well-known building, giving the overall effect of a vertically elongated but horizontally contracted spatial representation 23 which is in agreement with our finding of increased elongation along the vertical dimension (but see ref. 24 ).…”

The place-cell representation of volumetric space in rats

“…However behavioral experiments suggest a subtle difference, with an advantage in memory for horizontal as compared to vertical space 4 . More recent evidence suggests that people wrongly estimate the position of objects in a well-known building, giving the overall effect of a vertically elongated but horizontally contracted spatial representation 24 which is in agreement with our finding of increased elongation along the vertical dimension (but see 25 . The path which participants use to explore a building has also been shown to play a crucial role; people who explore a building by mainly vertical paths were better at recalling the positions of vertically arranged objects than people who explored the same building by mainly horizontal paths 26 supporting the importance of environment affordances in the development of spatial representations.…”

Vestibular contribution to three-dimensional dynamic (allocentric) and two-dimensional static (egocentric) spatial memory

“…Several vestibular pathways connect the hippocampus with the parietal cortex to subserve spatial learning and memory [7]. How the neural mechanisms in the parahippocampal place area, retrosplenial cortex, and medial temporal lobe interact to form a global representation of the three-dimensional world is only partially understood [8,9]. In monkeys the reference frames of vestibular self-motion signals differ in various multisensory cortex areas.…”