Consciousness and Spatial Cognition
In a rich and complex visual environment with informational overload, visuo-spatial cognition needs to be selective when it comes to representing relevant objects and locations in space. Hopefully, the visual world is structured, since objects and events tend to co-occur in predictable invariant ways (Biederman, 1972).
Knowledge about such redundancies and regularities in the visual world can be acquired in implicit ways and guides attention, as recently shown by Chun et al. (1998, 1999; Chun, 2000) in contextual cueing experiments. Reber (1989) has stated that if the stimulus environment is structured, then people learn to use this structure to control the behavior in an adaptive way. Learning the structure of the visual world seems to occur through high-capacity, progressively adapting and noise-resistant implicit learning processes that allow complex information about the environment to be acquired without intention and awareness. We do on the other hand also develop conscious explicit representations of space as testified by the use of highly sophisticated verbal descriptions of paths, landmarks and their spatial layout.
Studying the relationship between explicit and implicit spatial knowledge is especially interesting for the study of consciousness, since the specific adaptive benefits of both explicit and implicit spatial cognition are closely related to the question of the function of consciousness itself. Developing implicit knowledge about space is important when it comes to guiding navigational behavior in complex visual worlds and explicit knowledge is crucial for the communication of pathways or landmarks to other people.
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