Blocking in human place learning: Evidence from virtual navigation

The associative conditioning phenomenon of blocking has recently been demonstrated in nonhuman place-learning paradigms, including the Morris water task (MWT). We demonstrate blocking in humans learning to place navigate in a computerized version of the MWT. Participants trained to locate an invisible goal with an initial set of distal cues were deficient in learning to locate the goal with a set of cues inserted later during training. This outcome is inconsistent with the spontaneous integration of novel environmental features into a unified spatial representation proposed by cognitive mapping theory (O’Keefe & Nadel, 1978) and suggests that error-correcting associative learning principles operate in the human spatial mapping system.