Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 12, Issue 9, September 2008, Pages 355-361
Journal home page for Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Review
Whither geometry? Troubles of the geometric module

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.06.004Get rights and content

In rectangular arenas, rats often confuse diagonally opposite corners, even when distinctive cues differentiate them. This led to the postulation that rats rely preferentially on the geometry of space, encoded in a dedicated geometric module. Recent research casts doubt on this idea. Distinctive featural cues such as entire walls of a distinct color can hinder or aid the learning of geometry. In one situation in which using geometry would help greatly, rats had trouble learning the task. An associative model has been developed to capture these different learning processes, and view-based matching has been proposed as an alternative to the explicit coding of geometric cues. Considerations about how cues interact in learning are crucial in a recent theory of human spatial cognition.

Section snippets

Modularity of geometry in doubt

In the 1980s, modularity of mind was an influential proposal 1, 2. Fodor [2] proposed that peripheral perceptual processes are largely modular, but that central cognitive processes are largely nonmodular. Out of the flourishing study of spatial cognition in rats at the time 3, 4, 5, 6, a case of central modularity was proposed with the discovery of rotational errors in rats 7, 8. In these errors, rats confused diagonally opposite locations in a rectangular arena (Box 1). The phenomenon

Cue competition

Cue competition is a key concept in animal learning [28]. When multiple cues can be learned, one cue might interfere with the learning of another. When both Cue A and Cue B presented together predict an outcome, A might be less well learned than if it had been presented alone as the predictor. This phenomenon is called overshadowing [29]. Alternatively, a prior history of learning Cue B as a predictor might result in slower learning of Cue A when Cue A and Cue B are subsequently presented

If only they learned geometric cues: obligatory learning in doubt

In an important finding, rats had trouble learning to use geometric cues in a task in which it would have helped greatly to do so. Let us call this the color flip-flop task because the colors of walls changed frequently in the kite-shaped pool during training [22]. One side of the kite had a long black wall adjacent to a short black wall, the other side had a long white wall adjacent to a short white wall. But which color was on which side (top or bottom walls in Figure 1b) changed at random

Associative model of geometry and feature learning

How can features sometimes help the learning of geometry and sometimes hinder it? A recent associative model adapted the famous Rescorla-Wagner model [33] for geometry studies [23] (Box 2). The Rescorla-Wagner model was designed to account for cue competition in experiments on classical conditioning, in which all important events are determined by the experimenter. Events include one unconditioned stimulus of biological significance such as the presentation of food or electric shock and

View-based matching

A different attempt to deal with the troubles of the geometric module is view-based matching, a scheme that requires neither explicit extraction of geometric properties nor, a fortiori, a geometric module. The idea is not new at all; it has had a long tradition in insect navigation 34, 35, 36, 37, 38. The basic idea is to take a ‘snapshot’ of the scene surrounding the goal. The snapshot becomes the target view to recover, and the animal moves so as to reduce the discrepancy between the current

Whither geometry? Some speculations

Research on rats has a large influence on the study of human spatial cognition. In an exciting recent reformulation of geometry and features, phenomena of cue competition play a crucial part in delineating systems of spatial representation 26, 27. In virtual search tasks on a computer monitor, cue competition was found when humans located objects on the basis of nearby individual landmarks. By contrast, cue competition was absent when humans located objects with reference to the boundaries of

Concluding remarks

Several claims about geometry and features in Cheng and Newcombe's review [14] have been overturned by recent evidence in rats. Recent work shows that geometry and features are not always learned independently. Interactions in the form of cue competition and potentiation are rife, with large features hindering or sometimes helping the learning of geometric cues. Specifying the conditions favoring cue competition, independent learning or potentiation is an important empirical problem on which

Acknowledgements

I thank Anthony McGregor, Sara Shettleworth, Brett Gibson, Jochen Zeil and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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