Spatiotemporal properties in cognitive map formation: context-dependent effects of landmarks and perspective

Abstract

Effective navigation depends on the formation of cognitive maps, yet it remains unclear how temporal experience is integrated with spatial information during this process. While prior research has primarily emphasized external spatial cues, real-world navigation unfolds over time, raising the possibility that cognitive maps emerge from the integration of temporal and spatial information. The present study examined how the spatiotemporal properties of navigation—operationalized as navigation-duration—interacted with landmark availability and navigational perspective to shape different forms of spatial knowledge. A total of 149 participants completed a virtual navigation task, followed by measures of path distance estimation, landmark sequence memory, and sketch mapping. Results showed that navigation-duration selectively biased metric distance judgments but did not affect landmark sequence memory or sketch-map accuracy, indicating a dissociation between metric and structural representations. Critically, the effects of temporal information were modulated by environmental and representational context: aerial perspective improved layout accuracy only in the presence of landmarks, whereas ground-level perspective yielded more stable performance in their absence. Regression analyses further revealed that landmark knowledge, perspective, spatiotemporal properties, and sense of direction independently contributed to cognitive map accuracy. Together, these findings support a context-dependent integration account of cognitive map formation, in which temporal and spatial information are flexibly weighted depending on environmental structure and representational format. This work provides a mechanistic explanation for systematic spatial distortions and highlights the role of the spatiotemporal properties of navigation in cognitive map construction.