Are allocentric spatial reference frames compatible with theories of Enactivism?
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) Sabine U. König, Caspar Goeke, Tobias Meilinger et al. 3 citations preprint
Spatial knowledge about houses and streets is coded differently in the brain. Under time pressure, people are more accurate at pointing to the relative orientation of two houses than the absolute orientation of a single house toward north. Given unlimited time, accuracy for absolute house orientation improves greatly and surpasses the slight improvement for relative orientation. For streets, however, people perform better on absolute orientation even under time pressure. Pointing from one house to another yields the best performance overall. These results suggest that house orientation and location are primarily learned in an action-oriented, relational way, supporting enactive theories of cognition, whereas street orientation is preferentially coded in absolute, cardinal terms.