opinion trends in cognitive sciences vol.6 no.9 september 2002 human spatial ... · 2009-09-22 ·...

TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.9 September 2002376 Opinion

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Since the work of Tolman [1], many psychologistshave argued that mammalian navigation depends on internal representations that are enduring,geocentric, and comprehensive: ‘cognitive maps’of theenvironment. Suggestive evidence for cognitive mapscame from studies of rodents, who systematicallyexplore novel environments, detect displacedlandmarks, and take new paths between familiarlocations [1–3]. More recently, however, much of the mammalian spatial behavior that wasattributed to cognitive maps has been found todepend on representations of quite a different sort:representations that are dynamic, egocentric, andlimited to a restricted subset of environmentalinformation. Here we review briefly research onnavigating animals from ants to primates and then turn to research on human navigation. Wesuggest that momentary, egocentric, and limitedrepresentations underlie much of human spatialbehavior, including aspects of human navigation thathave been taken as paradigmatic evidence forcognitive maps.

We focus on three systems that underlienavigation in diverse animals: (1) a path integrationsystem that operates by dynamic updating, (2) a place recognition system that operates bytemplate matching of viewpoint-dependentrepresentations of landmarks, and (3) a reorientationsystem that operates by congruence-finding onrepresentations of the shape of the surface layout.After reviewing the evidence for these systems fromstudies of animal navigation, we consider evidence forthese systems from studies of humans. Finally, weask what might account for the special character ofhuman navigation.

Navigation systems in animals

Path integrationPath integration is a process by which the relation ofthe animal to one or more significant places in theenvironment is updated continuously as the animalmoves. For example, the position of the nest relativeto a foraging animal changes as the animal movesthrough the environment. By representing the nest’segocentric position as a vector, specifying both theradial direction and the distance of the nest from theanimal’s current position and heading, and bycontinuously subtracting from it a second vectorspecifying the direction and distance traveled fromthe last moment of updating to the current one, theresulting vector corresponds to the current egocentricposition of the home. (Alternatively, the nest could berepresented as the origin of a geocentric coordinatesystem, the ant’s current position represented as avector specifying its distance and direction from thenest, and updating could occur by vector addition.With one fixed and one changing position, these tworepresentational schemes are equivalent.)

Path integration has been found to be one of theprimary forms of navigation in insects [4–6], birds [7,8],and mammals [9–13]. For example, desert ants forageby traveling on new and apparently random routes andthen return home on a direct path once food is found. Ifa homeward-bound ant is passively carried in darknessto a new location, it moves on a parallel path for theappropriate distance [14] (Fig. 1). This findingindicates that ants do not find their way home bydetecting any perceptible features of the environment,for such features either are not available or conflictwith the chosen direction when ants are displaced intonew territory. Instead, ants rely on a global compasssystem (primarily provided by the sun), measure thehorizontal distance they travel (correcting for verticaldisplacements [15]), and update their relation to thenest throughout their movement.

Although path integration allows for sophisticatednavigation performance, including navigation aroundobstacles [16] and towards food sources [17], it showstwo characteristic limitations. First, it is subject tocumulative errors and therefore must be corrected orreset to provide accurate guidance for navigation.Second, path integration is a dynamic system forkeeping track of the home vector continuously andtherefore is subject to forgetting. When homeward-bound ants are placed in a jar and allowed to continue their journey after a variable delay, theirability to follow the appropriate vector coursevanishes after a few days [18]. To overcome theselimits, path integration is complemented by other,more enduring spatial representations.

View-dependent place recognitionThe primary form of place recognition in insects hasbeen characterized as a ‘snapshot’view-matchingsystem [19–23]. Evidence for snapshot representationscomes from experiments in which bees are trained

Human spatial

representation:

insights from animals

Ranxiao Frances Wang and Elizabeth S. Spelke

Human navigation is special: we use geographic maps to capture a world far

beyond our unaided locomotion. In consequence, human navigation is

widely thought to depend on internalized versions of these maps – enduring,

geocentric ‘cognitive maps’ capturing diverse information about the

environment. Contrary to this view, we argue that human navigation is

best studied in relation to research on navigating animals as humble as ants.

This research provides evidence that animals, including humans, navigate

primarily by representations that are momentary rather than enduring,

egocentric rather than geocentric, and limited in the environmental

information that they capture. Uniquely human forms of navigation build on

these representations.

Ranxiao Frances Wang

Dept of Psychology andBeckman Institute,University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel St,Champaign, IL 61820,USA.e-mail: [email protected]

Elizabeth S. Spelke*

Dept of Psychology,Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St,Cambridge, MA 02138,USA.*e-mail: [email protected]

TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.9 September 2002

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377Opinion

to forage at a place specified by landmarks and thenthe food sources and landmarks are moved or altered:the bees tend to search where landmarks subtend thesame visual angles as during training. Both wasps

and honeybees acquire these view-dependentrepresentations by approaching the feeder from aconstant direction, with their body orientationaligned in roughly the same horizontal direction, sothat the visual image of the scene is roughly the sameeach time an individual insect approaches the feeder[21,22], whereas wood ants store multiple snapshotsof a familiar landmark from different vantage pointsso as to recognize it from multiple angles [23]. Undercertain conditions, place representations captureinformation about the distances and the directions oflandmarks [24]. View-dependent placerepresentations with richer depth information guidenavigation in mammals and in insects. For example,rats tested in a water maze tend to approach a hiddenplatform from a familiar direction, suggesting thatthey use view-specific representations to recognizetheir location [25].

In familiar terrain, ants and bees useview-dependent place representations to navigatefrom one location to another [20]. When an ant’s scenerepresentations are placed into conflict with pathintegration, place representations typically have agreater influence on the ant’s initial path, and pathintegration comes to dominate later in the journey ifno new landmarks are detected [26]. These findingssuggest that ants use path integration to specify theglobal direction and distance of the nest, both infamiliar and in novel territory, and use view-dependent place representations to specify localregions of a journey through familiar territory.

ReorientationIn vertebrates, the path integration system is furthercomplemented by a reorientation system thatrestores the spatial relationship between the animaland its environment when path integration is fullydisrupted. Reorientation has now been studied in avariety of animals including primates [27], birds [28],fish [29], and especially rodents [13,30,31]. Cheng [30]allowed hungry rats to view the location of food in arectangular chamber with multiple visual andolfactory landmarks, and then disoriented the ratsand observed their subsequent search. Rats ignoredthe landmarks and searched for the food both at thecorrect location and at the symmetrical location at theopposite side of the room (Fig. 2), providing evidencethat they reoriented by means of an encapsulatedsystem operating on a geometric description of thesurface layout.

Although fish, birds and primates reorientprimarily by the shape of their surroundings, theirforaging performance is also influenced bynon-geometric information [27–29]. Moreover,disoriented rats navigate in accordance withnon-geometric landmark features when they aretested in a highly motivating escape task [31] or in afamiliar environment [32,33]. These findings suggestthat the navigation performance of disorientedanimals is enhanced by the view-dependent scene

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Fig. 1. The path integration system in ants and humans. (a) The homingtrajectory of an ant transported from the feeder, from the releasing point(S) to the location where the nest would have been had the ant not beentransported (N*). (b) The superimposed homing trajectory of 10 ants.Each dot represents the position of one ant recorded at 10-s intervalsduring the return journey (redrawn from Fig. 2, Ref. [14]). (c) The pathsof a representative blindfolded human subject returning to the startingpoint of two-leg paths of variable length (redrawn from Fig. 5, Ref. [34]).The blindfolded subject was led along the paths (indicated by the dashedline) and asked to return to the starting point at the end of the second leg(indicated by the dot) (corresponding to the ant’s release point). The crossindicates the starting point of the locomotion (corresponding to the nest).


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Fig. 2. The reorientation system in rats and children. (a) The search pattern of disoriented rats in arectangular box with distinctive visual and olfactory markings at each corner (redrawn from Table 1,Ref. [30]). The box had either four black walls (upper panel) or one white wall and three black walls(lower panel). (b) The search pattern of disoriented children in a rectangular chamber with either fourwhite walls (upper panel) or one blue wall and three white walls (lower panel) (redrawn from Fig. 4,Ref. [55]). Each figure presents the percentage of search trials (with standard errors) at the correctlocation (C), the rotationally equivalent location (R), and elsewhere (E, in gray), which includes the twogeometrically incorrect corners (E1 and E2). The search pattern was not affected by a non-geometriccue for either rats or children.



378 Opinion

representations discussed in the previous section:when a disoriented animal detects that two corners ofits rectangular environment are congruent with thelocation at which it searched for food, it can choosebetween these locations on the basis of their match ormismatch to scene representations that were storedin memory before disorientation [13]. Note, however,that disoriented animals do not navigate by suchlandmarks as robustly as oriented animals do [32].View-dependent scene representations may be mostuseful when an animal senses that it is close to theexpected scene [13].

SummaryAnimals with cognitive systems as simple as insectsnavigate by continuously updating the vectorsspecifying their relation to significant environmentallocations such as the nest. As they do so, animals storeegocentric representations of significant places forrecognition, and they use these representations ontrips through familiar territory, falling back on theirpath integration system when they wander into novelterrain. Finally, a variety of animals among fish, birdsand mammals reorient themselves primarily by thegeometry of the surrounding surface layout.

The representations constructed by thesemechanisms differ in three ways from the mapsconstructed by human geographers. First, maps areenduring, but the path integration system yields arepresentation that is continuously changing: it specifies environmental distances and directionsfrom the animal at that moment, rather than timelessspatial relationships. Second, maps are geocentric,but the representations that underlie place recognitionare egocentric: they specify the appearance oflandmarks from the vantage point of the navigatinganimal, rather than the distances and directions of allplaces in the environment from one another. Third,maps are unitary representations, but none of themechanisms found in animals gives rise to a unitaryrepresentation of all perceptible features of theenvironment. In particular, the reorientation systemrepresents only the shape of the permanent,surrounding surface layout. These differences raisepointed questions about human navigation.

The navigation system in humans

Although the human brain and cognitive system is far more complex than that of any other animal,humans may have inherited much of the samemachinery that is found throughout the animalkingdom and that guides navigation in a wide varietyof species. The navigation systems of ants, rodentsand humans might also have converged overevolution in response to similar ecological demands,as all these species are central place foragers. In thissection, we ask whether human navigation is guidedby the three processes discussed above: pathintegration, view-dependent scene recognition andgeometry-based reorientation.

Path integrationLike other animals, humans can return to the originof a path [34–36] (Fig. 1) and travel to familiarlocations along novel paths [37,38]. Do these abilitiesdepend on an allocentric cognitive map of theenvironment [1–3,13] or on a path integrationprocess? In principle, humans could pursue novel short-cut routes among multiple objects bycontinuously updating their relationships to eachobject as they move, in the same way that ants updatethe homing vector. By increasing the number ofvectors updated, a path integration system canflexibly guide the navigator to a multitude of locationsalong novel paths.

Timeless, allocentric spatial representations canbe distinguished from dynamic egocentric spatialrepresentations by investigating memory for aconfiguration of targets as the navigator moves.Whereas an allocentric map remains the same as thenavigator travels, an egocentric representation isupdated continuously. With noise in the updatingprocess, the configuration of the vectors will changeover time and the original configuration will beunrecoverable. Accordingly, we tested subjects’memory for a configuration of object locations underdifferent conditions of motion and disorientation [39].Subjects learned the locations of six surroundingobjects, pointed to the objects while blindfolded(baseline condition), disoriented themselves byturning, and then pointed to the objects again(disoriented condition). Error in the relative pointingresponses to different targets (‘configuration error’)was measured. Consistent with the dynamicupdating hypothesis, configuration error increasedafter disorientation (Fig. 3). By contrast, subjectsshowed no increase in configuration error when theexperiment was repeated with the addition of a single directional light that allowed subjects tomaintain their orientation as they turned (Fig. 3,oriented turning), providing evidence that theincreased error in the disorientation condition wasnot caused by memory or performance factors andwas instead associated specifically with the subjects’loss of orientation.

Finally, we tested whether the configuration of thetargets was recoverable after disorientation byfollowing the same procedure as in the orientedturning condition except during turning, when thelight was extinguished and subjects becamedisoriented. When the light was turned back on,subjects were able to reorient themselves, but theirconfiguration error was as high as in the originaldisoriented condition and higher than in the orientedturning condition (Fig. 3, reoriented). Pointingevidently was not guided by an enduring, allocentriccognitive map, for such a map should be available to reoriented subjects as well as to continuouslyoriented ones.

Do these results imply that humans have noenduring, allocentric representations of their



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surroundings? The studies of animal navigationreviewed above provide evidence for one suchrepresentation – a representation of the shape of thesurrounding surface layout that survives disorientationand allows animals to reorient themselves [30]. Our lastexperiments [39] tested for the same representation inhumans by having subjects point both to the cornersof a chamber and to an array of objects forming thesame angular configuration as the corners, bothbefore and after disorientation. Subjects showedincreased configuration error in the objects task but not in the corners task (Fig. 3), suggesting thatthe shape of the surface layout is encoded in anenduring, allocentric representation. Except for thisrepresentation, however, the dynamic path integrationsystem seems to be as fundamental to humannavigation as it is to the navigation of ants and bees.

View-dependent place recognitionLike insects, humans use view-dependentrepresentations to recognize objects and places [40–49].

For example, when subjects are shown an object array on a circular table and then judge whetherpictures taken from various vantage points presentthe same array, their response latency is a linearfunction of the angular distance between the test view and the studied view [41,49]. When an array isstudied from more than one vantage point, moreover, recognition performance is best at thestudied views and becomes progressively worse as the test view deviates further from the neareststudied view [41,49]. These findings provide evidencefor view-dependent representations of scenes.

Similar findings emerge from studies in which people learn to navigate through a virtualneighborhood of interconnecting streets furnishedwith multiple landmarks. Patterns of travel provideevidence that people learn to turn in specificdirections at particular places [50], and that theirturning decisions depend on local, view-dependentrepresentations of landmarks rather than on globalrepresentations of the scene [51]. Finally, studies ofpatients with unilateral neglect provide evidence that even highly familiar scenes are stored inview-dependent representations. Asked to imagine acity square while facing east, such a patient mayreport only the buildings to the south; asked then toimagine the same square while facing west, thepatient will report only the buildings to the north. In both cases, neglect of the left side of egocentricspace provides evidence for view-dependentrepresentations of the layout [52].

Recent studies reveal that humans update theseviewer-centered representations during locomotion.Wang and Simons [53] showed subjects an array ofobjects on a circular table and then tested their abilityto detect a moved object in the array after movementof themselves or the table. When subjects remained atthe study position, performance was better when the table remained still than when it was rotated,suggesting that recognition of a real world scene isview-specific (Fig. 4). When subjects were tested atthe new position, however, they performed betterwhen the table remained still, presenting a novel view of the array, than when it rotated with them and presented the familiar view [53]. The sameresults were obtained when subjects actively rotatedthe table or were passively wheeled to the newobservation point [53]. Finally, subjects’ability torecognize the scene was impaired when they weredisoriented between study and test [54]. Thesefindings provide further evidence that subjectsupdate egocentric representations of object arraysduring locomotion, and that updating is disrupted by disorientation.

ReorientationAlthough the experiments described above provideindirect evidence for a geometry-based reorientationsystem in humans [39], more direct evidence comesfrom experiments presenting adults and young


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Fig. 3. The egocentric updating system and representations of environment geometry in humans.Subjects first learned the locations of objects and were then blindfolded. In each experiment, thesubject sat on a swivel chair in the center of the room and pointed to the targets. (a) The square roomwith six surrounding targets. Four lights (ellipses) were mounted on the ceiling illuminating the room; one light served as the directional cue with the other three switched off. A video camera wasmounted at the center of the ceiling directly overhead to record the subjects’ pointing responses. (b) The rectangular room with four objects placed near the walls; the objects were arranged in thesame angular configuration as the four corners of the room. Again a swivel chair was placed in themiddle of the room, on which the subjects sat and pointed to the corners or the objects. As a measureof the internal consistency in pointing to multiple targets, configuration errors were calculated as thestandard deviation of the mean angular pointing errors of the individual targets. These are shown forthe disoriented, oriented-turning and reoriented conditions for the task of pointing to six objects (a,c)and for the tasks of pointing to objects versus corners (b,d), both before (baseline, open bars) andafter rotation (test, blue bars). (Redrawn from Ref. [39].)



380 Opinion

children with a variant of Cheng’s navigation task. In one series of studies [55], 1.5- to 2-year-old childrensaw a toy hidden in one corner of a rectangularchamber, were disoriented by turning, and then werereleased and encouraged to find the toy. In differentexperiments, the location of the toy was specified bythe distinctive color of a single wall or by the presenceof a distinctive landmark object. Like rats, childrensearched reliably and equally at the correct cornerand at the geometrically equivalent opposite corner(Fig. 2). Their successful use of room geometryshowed that they were motivated to perform the task,remembered the object’s location, and, like rats,reoriented in accordance with the shape of the surfacelayout but not by non-geometric landmarks.

Further experiments revealed that children’sfailure to reorient by non-geometric informationextends to square or circular rooms [56,57], is specificto the task of reorientation [55,56], and does not stem from any failure to detect or remember thelandmarks [56]. Experiments also provide evidencethat the representation guiding children’sreorientation captures information about the shape ofthe surface layout but not about the shape of aconfiguration of objects [57]. Finally, disorientedchildren, like animals, do rely on non-geometricinformation under certain conditions: they search inthe correct relation to a distinctively colored wall ifthey are tested in a large room [58], and they searchcorrectly when the hiding location has uniquedistinguishing properties such as a unique color orpattern [57]. Children, like rats, might therefore useview-specific scene representations to select amonggeometrically equivalent locations.

All of the above studies were conducted with youngchildren, and so they raise the question whetherhuman adults possess the same encapsulatedreorientation system. Adults tested in Hermer’s task successfully located an object in accordance withboth the shape of the room and a non-geometriclandmark [55]. Some subjects used egocentric spatiallanguage to describe the landmark information,reporting that an object was hidden ‘in the cornerwith a blue wall on the left’. Developmental studiesrevealed that the transition from encapsulated toflexible performance correlated with the acquisitionof these spatial terms and expressions [59]. Toinvestigate the effects of verbal encoding on adults’navigation and the existence of a language-independent geometric reorientation system,experiments investigated adults’performance in thisreorientation task under conditions of verbal andnonverbal interference [60]. Although nonverbalinterference led to an overall degradation ofperformance, human adults continued to use bothgeometric and landmark information. By contrast,verbal interference suppressed adults’ability to locate the object in relation to the landmark, whilesparing their ability to locate the object in relation tothe shape of the room. These findings provideevidence that the geometric reorientation systemfound in rats and in human children is present andfunctional in human adults. Under normalconditions, however, this navigation system issupplemented by a different system of representationthat captures landmark information and depends insome way on human language.

Conclusions

How do humans find their way from place to place? If psychologists take intuition as our starting point,then we may focus on humans’ striking and salientuse of maps and propose that the building blocks ofhuman navigation are internalized versions of thesesymbolic representations – cognitive maps. Studies ofanimal navigation nevertheless suggest a differentview. Although the maps that human geographersdesign are enduring, geocentric, and all-embracing intheir scope and flexibility, the internal representationsthat guide human navigation have none of theseproperties. Like many animals, humans navigate byforming, maintaining, and dynamically updating arepresentation of their momentary relationship tosignificant environmental locations. Humans alsorecognize objects and scenes by matching the currentvisual field to stored, view-specific representations ofplaces. Finally, humans reorient themselves whentheir path integration system is disabled by analyzing the shape, but not other properties, of thesurrounding layout. In all these cases, the findings ofexperiments on human navigation clash with human intuition and accord to a surprising degreewith the findings of experiments on navigation innon-human animals.


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Fig. 4. The updating of view-dependent scene representations in humans. (a) Subjects studied theobject array on a circular table and were tested either at the study position or after walking to adifferent position 40° around the table (‘New’). The test was then either with the same view of theobject array as the studied view or with a 40° rotated view. (b) Subjects’ accuracy in detecting a movedobject in the array from both test positions, either when the view matched that initially observed (blue bars) or when it was different (open bars). Accuracy was higher when the table positionremained the same as during initial observation, even though this meant a novel view from the newobservation point. (Redrawn from Figs 1 and 2 in Ref. [53].)

Acknowledgements

We thank C.R. Gallistel,Nancy Kanwisher, Steven Pinker, and Mary Potter for bracingdiscussions and forgiveall of them for continuingto believe in cognitivemaps. Thanks also to Tom Collett forcorrections andsuggestions. Supportedby NIH grant HD-23103 toE.S.S.



381Opinion

If all navigation abilities build on a common set ofmechanisms, then we may rephrase our initialquestion about human uniqueness: What enableshumans to go beyond the limits of these systems so asto navigate more flexibly? Studies of the phylogenyand ontogeny of human navigation provide anapproach to this question and hint at an answer.Coordinated studies of animals and human infantssuggest that the building blocks for these capacitiesare a set of encapsulated representations of the

environment. Studies of developing children andadults suggest that humans come to construct newspatial representations and navigational strategiesby drawing on specifically human symbolic capacities.From these hints may come specific, testablehypotheses about the mechanisms by which humansovercome the limits of our primitive navigationalsystems and create systems of representation that areunique in the living world – truly geocentric maps ofthe environment.

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49 Shelton, A.L. and McNamara, T.P. (1997) Multipleviews of spatial memory. Psychonomic Bull. Rev.4, 102–106

50 Gillner, S. and Mallot, H.A. (1998) Navigation andacquisition of spatial knowledge in a virtual maze.J. Cogn. Neurosci. 10, 445–463

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TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.9 September 2002382 Opinion

Experimental research on human languageprocessing has repeatedly demonstrated that thevarious sub-processes occur extremely quickly [1–3].Perhaps because of the concentration on individualsub-processes, many researchers implicitly assumethat these processes are not only initiated quickly, but are also completed quickly, resulting in the fastand dynamic construction of a fully articulatedanalysis of the linguistic input at each level. However, the time-course of processing and the depthof processing represent two orthogonal dimensions,and we currently know far more about the formerthan the latter.

In this article, we suggest that many processes areincomplete, and that interpretations are not as full aspossible, but are often ‘underspecified’. Recent workin computational linguistics and formal semanticshas highlighted underspecification, which allowsprocessing to proceed without maintaining a fullanalysis. Also, a variety of results in psycholinguisticsshow that language processing can be shallower than is commonly assumed. We shall argue thatduring comprehension, each word in a sentence does not necessarily contribute its full meaning, and these meanings are not always combined into

higher-level phrase meanings through a fullydeterminate analysis.

Our case is that underspecification has a majorrole to play in the further development of processmodels of language comprehension. In fact, fullyspecified interpretations of language can often seemboth undesirable and unnecessary. For instance,consider the pronouns in the following sentences:(1) Mary bought a brand new Hitachi radio.(2) It was in Selfridge’s window.(3) Later, when Joan saw it, she too decided it would be

a good purchase.A full specification of the referent of it in (2) is not

possible. Did Mary buy the particular radio that wasphysically in the window, or was the one in thewindow just an exemplar of the set of radios? Theinterpretation of it in (3) offers even morepossibilities. This example shows that processingmight not occur to a fine grain. Indeed, it has beenargued that there are many cases where the referentof a pronoun cannot be determined, and yet people arenot concerned about this fact. Another example of anunresolved pronoun comes from the TRAINS corpuscollected at the University of Rochester. The corpus isof dialogs about about train scheduling: A: ‘can we kindly hook up….uh…engine E2 to the

boxcar at Elmira’B: ‘okay’A: ‘and send it to Corning as soon as possible please’B: ‘okay’

The pronoun it in the penultimate line is unresolvedbecause it is ambiguous as to whether it refers to theengine, the boxcar, or both [4]. However, in thisexample, because the result of sending it to Corningremains the same, the referent of it may remainunderspecified without affecting the key interpretation.The general question in these cases is whether or not aparticular interpretation has been given, or whethersome less specific representation has been formed.

Shallow processing in computational linguistics

Recent work in computational linguistics has usedunderspecified representations of text. So, althoughfull parsing aims to recover a fully articulatedgrammatical structure for a sentence, ‘shallow parsing’[5], aims simply to identify non-overlapping ‘chunks’ofstructure in a text (Fig. 1). Choosing whether to builda full or shallow parser depends on how one wishes touse the resulting representations. For some tasks (e.g. automatic generation of indexes for large texts),shallow parsing is sufficient, whereas others (e.g. machine translation) require fuller analyses.

Depth of processing

in language

comprehension: not

noticing the evidence

Anthony J. Sanford and Patrick Sturt

The study of processes underlying the interpretation of language often

produces evidence that they are complete and occur incrementally.

However, computational linguistics has shown that interpretations are often

effective even if they are underspecified. We present evidence that similar

underspecified representations are used by humans during comprehension,

drawing on a scattered and varied literature. We also show how linguistic

properties of focus, subordination and focalization can control depth of

processing, leading to underspecified representations. Modulation of degrees

of specification might provide a way forward in the development of models of

the processing underlying language understanding.

Anthony J. Sanford*

Patrick Sturt

Dept of Psychology,University of Glasgow, 58 Hillhead Street,Glasgow, UK G12 8QB.*e-mail:[email protected]

56 Wang, R.F. et al. (1999) Mechanisms ofreorientation and object localization by humanchildren: a comparison with rats. Behav.Neurosci. 113, 475–485

57 Gouteux, S. and Spelke, E.S. (2001) Children’s use of geometry and landmarks to reorient

in an open space. Cognition 81, 119–14858 Learmonth, A.E. et al. (2001) Toddlers’use of

metric information and landmarks to reorient.J. Exp. Child Psychol. 80, 225–244

59 Hermer-Vazquez, L. et al. (2001) Language, space,and the development of cognitive flexibility in

humans: the case of two spatial memory tasks.Cognition 79, 263–299

60 Hermer-Vazquez, L. et al. (1999) Sources offlexibility in human cognition: dual-task studies of space and language. Cogn. Psychol. 39,3–36

http://tics.trends.com 1364-6613/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S1364-6613(02)01958-7

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