Study title

The project concerns both the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in flexible and habitual forms of spatial learning. Traditionally it has been thought that flexible navigation is based upon a map-like representation of a person’s environment – a cognitive map - and that this representation is subserved by the hippocampus. The cognitive map is thought to integrate the relations among stimuli in an environment so that a route through the environment can be planned without having to have direct experience of that route. In addition, influential theories of spatial learning argue that the formation of a cognitive map, based on some parameters around cue type or environmental stability, is incidental – occurring as a person encounters new stimuli, regardless of prior learning experience. Our starting point for our project was to test both the notion of incidental learning in flexible spatial learning, and to determine if a hippocampus-based cognitive map was only one function of the hippocampus in spatial learning, testing if it is also involved in non-mapping functions that involve complex representations of prior and future events and their relations to one another. We conducted a series of spatial learning experiments in which participants control a first-person perspective navigating around and environment. Generally, control was via keys on a computer keyboard and the participant sat a short distance away from a computer screen. In our first output we tested two theories of incidental spatial learning by testing whether certain spatial cues, or environmental stability, created an immunity for spatial learning to be susceptible to a form of cue competition known as blocking. Blocking occurs when prior learning to a cue prevents subsequent learning to an added cue and is the hallmark of associative learning theory. This is because associative learning algorithms rely on prediction error to explain learning, meaning that new learning only occurs when...