The Effect Of Global And Local Geometric Cues On Reorienation

An ability to reorient with spatial cues in environment is an important skill of survival. A substantial amount of literature has accumulated regarding reorientation by means of the geometric cues. Much theoretical debate remains as to which aspects of geometric information are encoded,as well as how geometry is used in reorientation.both global and local geometric cues are likely to be utilized for renavigation, but current studies generously consider the two kinds of geometric cues as one. More research is needed to disentangle the effect of global and local geometric cues in reorientation. Thus,in the current study, we aim to clarify what aspects of geometric cues are utilized in reorientation by constructing more immersing and realistic environment using the technique of virtual reality.Using the same experiment paradigms in the two experiments of this article,we trained human adults to remember the localization of five objects in the learning phase,of which the environment is rectangular-shaped, includes global and local geometric cues extracting from the configuration of four truncated walls or corners in different length and angle. Once the learning phase was completed, they have to finish reorientation or relocalization in the baseline condition, only-global-cue condition and only-local-cue condition. In the baseline condition, environment is the same as that in the learning phase,which is used to determine whether participants' memory about the target orientation or location is accurate. The only-global-cue condition is manipulated by setting all the truncated walls are of equal length, or all the corners are of equal degree, effectively negating local geometry as a viable cue. And the environment in only-global-cue condition is square shaped, leaving only the local corner angles or the truncated wall lengths informative. We dissociate the global and local geometric cues by using unenclosed environment. In the current studies, Experiment 1 investigate the utilization of local length and global shape in the reorientation; Experiment 2 explores the utilization of local angle cues and global shape. The results show that participants encode and use global and local length information for reorientation, while they cannot use the local angular information but global shape of angles for reorientation.