Crossing boundaries: Global reorientation following transfer from the inside to the outside of an arena

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. In two spatial navigation experiments, human participants were asked to find a hidden goal (a Wi-Fi signal) that was located in one of the right-angled corners of a kite-shaped (Experiment 1) or a cross-shaped (Experiment 2) virtual environment. Goal location was defined solely with respect to the geometry of the environment. Following this training, in a test conducted in extinction, participants were placed onto the outside of the same environments and asked to locate the Wi-Fi signal. The results of both experiments revealed that participants spent more time searching in regions on the outside of the environments that were closest to where the Wi-Fi signal was located during training. These results are difficult to explain in terms of analyses of spatial navigation and re-orientation that emphasize the role of local representational encoding or view matching. Instead, we suggest that these results are better understood in terms of a global representation of the shape of the environment.