In large-scale navigation, landmarks are useful spatial cues. However, their effect on small-scale navigation, such as distance perception and path integration, has not been fully explored. In addition, the mechanism on searching and processing the visual information during locomotion is different from that on egocentric distance judgment in a static scene. Therefore, it is a significant research question in terms of theoretical contribution and practical values to further investigate the effect of landmarks. In Research 1, participants were asked to learn and reproduce the locomotive distance through simulated self-movements in virtual reality. The results showed the type of the visual environments mediated the strategy participants used in distance reproduction. In Research 2, a static-frame paradigm was used to separate the static scenes from the motion cues during simulated self-movements. By comparing the effect of these two kinds of information, landmarks were proved to be effective when motion cues were removed and the effect of this static mechanism functioned as well as the motion-based mechanism. Research 3 was aimed to extend the findings in distance estimation to the process of path integration. However, the current results only revealed potential advantage of landmarks on visual path integration. In sum, the main findings of all seven experiments are as follows: 1) landmarks as visual cues are effective on locomotion distance perception, however, this effect is mediated by the novelty of the environment; 2) the type of the visual environments mediated the strategy participants used in distance reproduction: when the visual information is sufficient, participants can perceive the real spatial distance, while when the visual cues are rare, they are also able to reproduce the distance according to traveling time; 3) the advantage of landmarks is that when motion cues were removed, people are still able to estimate the distance through a series of static scenes; 4) when only visual information is provided, even with redundant visual cues, people still showed large biased on path integration which confirmed the necessity of the body sense when processing the path integration. Taken together, the current study found out the effect and feature of landmarks on small-scale navigation, and explored the mechanism of processing landmarks on locomotion spatial perception. The main contributions are: the static-frame paradigm was first developed and used to prove the effect of static scene mechanism which was also the base of the advantage of landmarks as visual cues; the spatiotemporal information was separated by regression analysis and the mediated effect of visual environment type was found on the strategy used to reproduce the distance.
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