Blocking in human place learning: Evidence from virtual navigation

The associative conditioning phenomenon of blocking has recently been demon strated in nonhuman place-learning paradigms, including the Morris water ta sk (MWT). We demonstrate blocking in humans learning to place navigate in a computerized version of the MWT. Participants trained to locate an invisib le goal with an initial set of distal cues were deficient in learning to lo cate the goal with a set of cues inserted later during training. This outco me is inconsistent with the spontaneous integration of novel environmental features into a unified spatial representation proposed by cognitive mappin g theory (O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978) and suggests that error-correcting associa tive learning principles operate in the human spatial mapping system.