Cognitive and Motor Representations of Space and Their Use in Human Visually-Guided Locomotion

Abstract

The ability of animals to move around their environments, encountering or avoiding objects; knowing where to seek them out; or finding their way to a distant home that is out of sight, all depend on a complex combination of perceptual and motor skills that has long preoccupied students of behaviour. On the one hand, a vast animal literature has developed to investigate how animals learn to operate in large scale environments, whether using classical psychological techniques in the laboratory or the field study methods of ethology in natural environments. These problems have also increasingly attracted students of human behaviour, particularly in a developmental context, and such research is well-represented in the present volume. All such studies, however, have in common a concern with the development of long-term representations of space, internalised through prolonged interaction with the environment. Moreover, such representations are almost always truly cognitive, in that the environment to be represented is seldom seen all at one time, but is constructed on the basis of viewpoints sampled at different times. Here we present evidence of a different type of spatial representation, appearing at the one time more sensory in nature, yet bearing many of the features of cognitive representations. Our aim here will be to describe such representations and discuss their possible role in spatial orientation.