Determinants of caregiver burden among family caregivers of post-intensive care syndrome patients at 2 weeks post-discharge: a cross-sectional study.

With experience moving through an environment, we are able to acquire spatial knowledge about the relative locations of landmarks in addition to learning routes to destinations. Klatzky () distinguishes between egocentric and allocentric spatial representations. An egocentric representation would encode the locations of landmarks relative to the observer, which would be directly applicable to guiding navigation. In contrast, an allocentric representation would encode spatial relationships in a way that is independent of the current observer location. An allocentric spatial representation is often referred to as survey knowledge or a cognitive map (O’Keefe & Nadel, ; Tolman, ). Moving through the environment provides direct information about egocentric positions of objects and landmarks, but some further processing would be required to integrate this information into a cognitive map (Burgess, ; Ekstrom et al., ; Wang, ). Although we can learn the layout of a large-scale environment by navigation, the mental representation formed from navigation alone may not be accurate or consistent. People often show large errors or inconsistencies in estimates of distances within learned environments (e.g., Foo, et al., ; Philbeck & Learly, ). Map sketches after exploring an environment also tend to have large distortions in the relative locations of objects (Foo et al., ). Even for very familiar real-world environments, judgments of relative direction can show pointing errors as large as 40°–85° (Frankenstein et al., ). Extensive experience with an environment and ability to easily navigate to locations does not guarantee that people have formed an accurate representation of allocentric relationships. Another way to acquire spatial knowledge about a large-scale environment is by viewing a map, which is qualitatively different from learning through navigation. Maps present spatial information in an allocentric reference frame, so they convey allocentric relations in an accurate and consistent way. In this study, we test whether viewing a map can facilitate the process of learning from direct navigation experience.