# An Experimental Study on the Formation of Spatial Cognitive Maps in Humans
## 1 Introduction  
Finding our way through landscapes, cities, and buildings is a complex cognitive skill. It includes the integration of multimodal cues about the spatial layout of the environment and about one's own motion through it, transformations between multiple spatial reference frames, spatial memory, goal-setting, route planning, and executive control [1, 2]. Successful wayfinding often relies on internal representations of space called \"cognitive maps\" [3] or \"survey knowledge\" [4]. The term 'cognitive map' should not be interpreted literally, as an exact replica of the real world. Rather, like other cognitive phenomena, a cognitive map is a \"coping tool...for handling tasks, which typically does not entail exact modeling of the world\" [5]. Continuing with the \"map\" metaphor, behavioral and neurophysiological research indicates that cognitive maps can be distorted, influenced by assumptions,fragmented, poor in detail, and in some cases even non-metric [6; 7]. Nonetheless, internal representations support flexible route planning, enabling individuals to take shortcuts, navigate around obstacles, and travel along routes they have never taken before. These representations enable flexible route planning that takes shortcuts and roadblocks into account, and allows travel along routes never taken before. Most studies have investigated cognitive map formation using alternating learning and test trials: during learning trials, participants explored the environment and encountered various objects; during test trials, they indicated the locations of these objects. In this research, response accuracy increased steadily from one test to the next [8; 9; 10], which seems to suggest that cognitive maps emerge gradually with practice. However, the observed gradual increase could actually be an averaging artifact: cognitive maps might emerge abruptly, but at differing times depending on the participant and/or on the tested environmental location, yielding an artificially smooth curve when aggregated. In what follows, this location-specific abrupt emergence will be named \"locally abrupt\". Earlier research reported that individuals indeed vary widely in their spatial skills, depending on factors such as sex, cognitive abilities and personality [11; 12; 13]. Furthermore, some environmental objects are easier to localize than others, depending, e.g., on their familiarity and their distance from physical or perceived boundaries [14; 15] which could be the basis for the locally abrupt emergence of a cognitive map. Finally, evidence for abrupt--albeit not locally abrupt--emergence is provided by the phenomenon of \"reorientation\", where individuals experience abrupt transitions between feeling disoriented and feeling oriented [16; 17]. All these findings are in accordance with the view that the observed gradual emergence of cognitive maps might be an averaging artifact. The main purpose of the present work was to provide persuasive experimental evidence of whether cognitive maps form in a locally abrupt or in a gradual fashion. To this end, participants were given an alternating sequence of learning trials and test trials, as in earlier research, but their performance was analyzed separately for each combination of object and participant to avoid averaging artifacts. This analysis was anchored in \"hits\", i.e., the first correct localization of a given object by a given participant. If locations in cognitive maps emerge abruptly, a hit should almost invariably be followed by another correct response to the same object by the same participant. If locations emerge gradually, the probability of a correct response after a hit should be similar to that after a non-hit. A second purpose was to determine the relationship between the fidelity of cognitive maps and the number of environmental objects present. Distinctive objects, often called \"landmarks\", facilitate internal representations of space since they serve as reference points for nearby locations [18] and for structuring the environment [19].