Am I Crossing a Border? Spatial Regionalization and Route Choice Depends on Perceived Landmark Categorization

ABSTRACTWe investigated the role of semantic similarities of place names in forming larger regions. The environment´s place names allowed two alternative semantic categorizations corresponding to two equally valid regionalizations. In a priming phase, participants were biased to one or the other categorization scheme. Region perception was assessed by having participants choose between two equidistant routes crossing different numbers of region boundaries. Participants selected routes with a lower number of region crossings according to the primed categorization in 61% of all cases. The results show that perceived semantic similarity of place names affects route choice and the formation of spatial regions.KEYWORDS: Regionsroute choicecognitive mapspatial languagevirtual environments AcknowledgmentsWe are grateful to Svenja Zehender, Leonie Mödl and Jule Wildt for their contributions to the development of this experiment.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Author contributionAll authors contributed to the study conception and design. L.L. performed the experiments and analyzed the data. All authors jointly prepared the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.Data availability statementData is available at https://osf.io/d75xu/.Data depositionhttps://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.10.515979Informed consentInformed written consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.Research involving human participants and/or animalsThe manuscript does not contain data from clinical studies, patients, or non-human animal data.Additional informationFundingThe research reported in this paper was carried out at the Department of Biology of the University of Tübingen. Additional support was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG – German Research Foundation) under Grant no. 381713393, within the Research Unit FOR2718: Modal and Amodal Cognition.