Memorable navigation: Assessing the influence of way-finding in spatial clustering
Navigating around an environment and remembering the events that took place within it are crucial cognitive abilities that have been linked to the Hippocampus and medial temporal lobes (MTL). Scene Construction Theory (SCT) has proposed that a function of the Hippocampus is the implicit and continuous construction of scenes to help prediction of upcoming environment. Scenes, as highly efficient means of packaging information, underpin in coordination with other brain regions, episodic memory (EM), spatial navigation, future thinking and perhaps even dreaming and mind-wandering. We examined the conditions in which spatial contiguity of stimuli influences the organization of memory by examining spatial clustering (SC) phenomenon. In this research, an augmented reality (AR) system was used to test 14 participants in a spatially dependent memory task which assessed the SC differences between active navigators and passive spectators. We confirmed our hypothesis that navigators use spatial information as part of the retrieval process in free recall, as they tended to sequentially recall any two neighboring otherwise unrelated items. We also found a significant correlation between SC and correct recall performance supporting our second hypothesis. These results may be valuable for design of learning applications, especially dealing with large amounts of data. Research on Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases may also benefit from our approach. Future studies may assess the role of encoding and retrieval modality and participant's use of mnemonic strategies.