An Adaptive Cue Selection Model of Allocentric Spatial Reorientation

After becoming disoriented, an organism must use the local environment to reorient and recover vectors to important locations. Debates over how this happens have been extensive. A new theory, Adaptive Combination, suggests that the information from different spatial cues are combined with Bayesian efficiency. To test this further, we modified the standard reorientation paradigm to be more amenable to Bayesian cue combination analyses while still requiring reorientation, still requiring participants to recall goal locations from memory, and focusing on situations that require the use of the allocentric (world-based; not egocentric) frame. 12 adults and 20 children at 5-7 years old were asked to recall locations in a virtual environment after a disorientation. They could use either a pair of landmarks at the North and South, a pair at the East and West, or both. Results were not consistent with Adaptive Combination. Instead, they are consistent with the use of the most useful (nearest) single landmark in isolation. We term this Adaptive Selection. Experiment 2 suggests that adults also use the Adaptive Selection method when they are not disoriented but still required to use a local allocentric frame. This suggests that the process of recalling a location in the allocentric frame is typically guided by the single most useful landmark, rather than a Bayesian combination of landmarks – regardless of whether the use of the allocentric frame is forced by disorientation or another method. These failures to benefit from a Bayesian strategy accord with the broad idea that there are important limits to Bayesian theories of the cognition, particularly for complex tasks such as allocentric recall.