Abstract
The associative conditioning phenomenon of blocking has recently been demonstrated in nonhuman place-learning paradigms, including the Morris water task (MWT). We demonstrate blocking in humans learning to place navigate in a computerized version of the MWT. Participants trained to locate an invisible goal with an initial set of distal cues were deficient in learning to locate the goal with a set of cues inserted later during training. This outcome is inconsistent with the spontaneous integration of novel environmental features into a unified spatial representation proposed by cognitive mapping theory (O’Keefe & Nadel, 1978) and suggests that error-correcting associative learning principles operate in the human spatial mapping system.
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The authors thank Frank Logan and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
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Hamilton, D.A., Sutherland, R.J. Blocking in human place learning: Evidence from virtual navigation. Psychobiology 27, 453–461 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03332140
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03332140