preview

Spatial Cognition Mini-Review

Best Essays

Mini-Review: Spatial Cognition Spatial Cognition is concerned with the achievement, organization, application, and modification of knowledge about spatial surroundings (Bandura., 1963). These capabilities enable animals and humans to manage basic and high-level cognitive tasks in everyday life (Bandura.,1971). Spatial cognition studies have assisted to tie cognitive psychology and neuroscience together. Most researchers are concerned about how animals acquire and find information. Since acquiring and acting on spatial information appears to have computational requirements from learning to predict temporal sequences of events, we might expect to find adaptively specialized, domain-specific mechanisms of spatial learning and/or …show more content…

The global picture developing from this support is that spatial cognition can be split into two genres which are to some magnitude divided in mammalian brain (Hartley & Burgess., 2001). There are various mechanisms for spatial cognition, which pose the ultimate question: “Do animals have cognitive maps?” (Shettleworth., 2010) These include dead reckoning, beacons, landmarks, routes, and geometry (Shettleworth., 2010). Dead reckoning is an internal sense of the direction and distance of the target from the current position. It is one of the most basic and ubiquitous ways in which animals keep track of their location with respect to a known position. It has been mostly studied in bees, spiders, and ants. Dead reckoning is a mechanism for egocentric spatial localization, that is, the animal is localizing things in the environment with respect to itself. Beacons are local or proximal cues, whereas landmarks are global or distal cues (Shettleworth., 2010). A guide animals can use when features of a goal are not immediately perceptible from a distance in fixed locations are called landmarks (Shettleworth., 2010). They are used based on three factors: template matching and local views, vector sum model, and multiple bearing models. Route learning is often referred to as reaching a goal using a series of landmarks, which is a series of stimulus-response (S-R) associations (Shettleworth., 2010). This concept can be

Get Access