section_path: Navigation in spatial cognition
section_name: Navigation in spatial cognition
paragraph_text: Navigation in spatial cognition
  
  Navigation is an essential everyday activity that involves a series of abilities that help humans and animals to locate, track, and follow paths in order to arrive at different destinations. Navigation, in spatial cognition, allows for acquiring information about the environment by using the body and landmarks of the environment as frames of references to create mental representations of our environment, also known as a cognitive map. Humans navigate by transitioning between different spaces and coordinating both egocentric and allocentric frames of reference.
  
  Navigation can be distinguished into two sptial components: locomotion and wayfinding. Locomotion is the process of movement from one place to another, both in humans and in animals. Locomotion helps you understand an environment by moving through a space in order to create a mental representation of it. Wayfinding is defined as an active process of following or deciding upon a path between one place to another through mental representations. It involves processes such as representation, planning and decision which help to avoid obstacles, to stay on course or to regulate pace when approaching particular objects.
  
  Navigation and wayfinding can be approached in the environmental space. According to Dan Montello ’s space classification, there are four levels of space with the third being the environmental space. The environmental space represents a very large space, like a city, and can only be fully explored through movement since all objects and space are not directly visible. Also Barbara Tversky systematized the space, but this time taking into consideration the three dimensions that correspond to the axes of the human body and its extensions: above/below, front/back and left/right. Tversky ultimately proposed a fourfold classification of navigable space: space of the body, space around the body, space of navigation and space of graphics.