Affordances for Spatial Navigation

Abstract

Successful navigation often requires detecting and exploiting a range of affordances in the environment. These can be visible affordances such as a path enabling efficient travel, a landmark to distinguish the direction, or a boundary to locate a goal. Other affordances require greater integration of sensory information with stored knowledge, such as determining that a novel path will be a shortcut, or being able to infer that the current region of the environment has strong global connections due to its long line of sight and central location in the broader space. This essay reviews studies exploring affordances for navigation and their neural underpinnings. We highlight recent discoveries indicating a role of the occipital place area in detecting path affordances, the retrosplenial cortex in landmark processing, and the hippocampus in processing path connections. Finally, we extend our consideration to affordances of an environment that impact affect, where layout or features could induce negative affect such as fear, and the reverse where affordances can enhance positive affect by, for example, offering a sense of safety. Such alterations in the emotional state may impact navigation and learning of an environment, and we suggest new avenues for research to explore this.