| dc.description.abstract | Navigation of a physical space is facilitated by spatially tuned neurons in the hippocampal formation. These cells are thought to instantiate a cognitive map, affording an animal with an internal representation of its environment. The utilization of cognitive maps may extend beyond physical spaces and represent abstract domains, such as conceptual spaces. It is theorized that like physical space, conceptual spaces have a well-defined architecture. If physical and conceptual spaces share an underlying metric, knowledge may be acquired in a similar manner across these domains. Testing this theory, we designed an immersive virtual reality (VR) paradigm in which participants explored a novel conceptual space through navigation on an omnidirectional motion platform. Our conceptual space was defined by two dimensions, each corresponding to a quantity of shapes. A unique color code was utilized to represent heading direction, providing an egocentric reference frame. We tested whether the conceptual space could be navigated with physical movement, and if spatial strategies were employed to represent positional relationships. We found that participants navigated with high accuracy, and exhibited significant improvement in their trajectories. When asked to imagine navigating between sets of positions, participants estimated the heading angle at a high resolution, and their distance estimations scaled with the Euclidean distance. Our results support the notion that conceptual and spatial knowledge may share a similar map-like representation, where spatial navigation strategies facilitate the learning of non-physical domains. | |