Rescaling of distance judgments with geometric and contextual changes

Grid cells have been identified in the entorhinal cortex of rodents and humans, as well as other mammals. In rodents, these “distance computing” neurons exhibit altered firing fields in response to environmental manipulations, including changes to geometry or specific contextual cues (e.g., color). The current study investigated whether these neurophysiological observations in rodents could predict human behavior in a distance judgment task under various environmental manipulations. Participants (n = 51) completed 22 trials involving distance traversal, memorisation, and distance replication across five experimental conditions: control (no manipulation), contextual manipulation (novel environment), and geometric manipulations (local expansion and contraction; global expansion and contraction). Results demonstrated that environmental expansions led to significant overestimations in distance judgments, consistent with rodent grid cell data. Global geometric manipulations yielded significant overestimations compared to the control condition. For the local manipulations, judgments were least accurate when made in the vicinity of the local manipulation. These behavioral patterns are consistent with localized deformations in spatial representations, as would be predicted from rodent grid cell studies. As hypothesized, changes to the environmental context (the novel environment condition) also resulted in significant distance overestimations. In conclusion, environmental manipulations influenced the accuracy of human distance judgments in a manner paralleling the firing field changes observed in rodent grid cells under similar environmental alterations. These findings demonstrate behavioral parallels between human distance estimation and rodent grid cell responses to environmental manipulations, suggesting possible commonalities in spatial processing across species.