Year: 2016
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: When humans draw maps, or make judgments about travel-time, their responses are rarely accurate and are often systematically distorted. Distortion effects on estimating time to arrival and the scale of sketch-maps reveal the nature of mental representation of time and space. Inspired by data from rodent entorhinal grid cells, we predicted that familiarity to an environment would distort representations of the space by expanding the size of it. We also hypothesized that travel-time estimation would be distorted in the same direction as space-size, if time and space rely on the same cognitive map. We asked international students, who had lived at a college in London for 9 months, to sketch a south-up map of their college district, estimate travel-time to destinations within the area, and mark their everyday walking routes. We found that while estimates for sketched space were expanded with familiarity, estimates of the time to travel through the space were contracted with familiarity. Thus, we found dissociable responses to familiarity in representations of time and space. © 2016 The Authors Hippocampus Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Source: Hippocampus
DOI: 10.1002/hipo.22672
Authors: Anna Jafarpour, Hugo Spiers
Institutions: University of California, Berkeley, University College London
Language: English
Subfield: Automotive Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,424
OpenAlex ID: W2539119223