Tracking acquisition of cognitive maps in early- and late-onset blindness

Abstract

Cognitive maps encode spatial relationships between locations and support flexible navigation. However, how these mental representations form in blindness remains unclear. Here, we introduce a multisensory virtual navigation paradigm that monitors non-visual cognitive map formation over time. Sixteen early blind (EB), 17 late blind (LB), and 29 sighted controls (SC) learned the layout of a tactile maze and, in a virtual version, repeatedly performed pointing (judgment of relative directions) and navigation (reaching locations) tasks. Thus, this experiment tracked both functional and spatio-cognitive components of cognitive map formation across multiple learning stages and showed that EB accumulated knowledge more slowly than SC. In addition, both EB and LB had reduced pointing accuracy under viewpoint changes, indicating difficulty translating cognitive maps into first-person perspectives. Yet, navigation and pointing improved in all groups, and a subset of EB and LB achieved expert-level performance. In sum, this study provides a scalable framework for tracking the temporal dimension of cognitive map formation in blindness and other neurological conditions, informing how spatial knowledge is acquired and translated into navigation behavior. Importantly, it suggests that allocentric cognitive map formation in blindness is an experience-dependent process that varies across time and individuals. Observed spatial disadvantages in both blind groups may result from adaptive strategies that constrain the use of allocentric cognitive maps, independent of prior visual experience.