Are allocentric spatial reference frames compatible with theories of Enactivism?

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract Theories of Enactivism propose an action-oriented approach to understand human cognition. So far, however, empirical evidence supporting these theories has been sparse. Here, we investigate whether spatial navigation based on allocentric reference frames that are independent of the observer’s physical body can be understood within an action-oriented approach. Therefore, we performed three experiments testing the knowledge of the absolute orientation of houses and streets towards north, the relative orientation of two houses and two streets, respectively, and the location of houses towards each other in a pointing task. Our results demonstrate that under time pressure, the relative orientation of two houses can be retrieved more accurately than the absolute orientation of single houses. With infinite time for cognitive reasoning, the performance of the task using house stimuli increased greatly for the absolute orientation and surpassed the slightly improved performance in the relative orientation task. In contrast, with streets as stimuli participants performed under time pressure better in the absolute orientation task. Overall, pointing from one house to another house yielded the best performance. This suggests, firstly, that orientation and location information about houses are primarily coded in house-to-house relations, whereas cardinal information is deduced via cognitive reasoning. Secondly, orientation information for streets is preferentially coded in absolute orientations. Thus, our results suggest that spatial information about house and street orientation is coded differently and that house orientation and location is primarily learned in an action-oriented way, which is in line with an enactive framework for human cognition.