Time warps our mental maps: how duration, landmarks and perspective shape navigation

When you walk through an unfamiliar building, your brain is not only recording where you have been. According to a new study published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, it is also quietly tracking how long you have been moving, and that temporal signal can systematically distort the mental maps you take away from the experience.

The research, led by Lei Huang and colleagues including Ming Ji, examined how navigation-duration, a way of operationalizing the spatiotemporal properties of navigation, interacts with landmark availability and navigational perspective to shape different forms of spatial knowledge. A total of 149 participants completed a virtual navigation task, followed by tests of path distance estimation, landmark sequence memory, and sketch mapping.

The central finding was a clean dissociation between metric and structural representations. Navigation-duration selectively biased metric distance judgments, yet it did not affect landmark sequence memory or the accuracy of participants’ sketch maps. In other words, the passage of time warped how far people thought they had traveled without disturbing their memory of the order in which landmarks appeared or their grasp of the overall layout.

Crucially, the influence of temporal information was not uniform. It depended on environmental and representational context. Aerial perspective improved layout accuracy only when landmarks were present, whereas ground-level perspective yielded more stable performance in their absence. The value of seeing an environment from above, it seems, hinges on having salient reference points to anchor the view.

Regression analyses added a further layer: landmark knowledge, perspective, spatiotemporal properties, and sense of direction each independently contributed to cognitive map accuracy. No single factor dominated; instead, multiple sources of information converged to determine how faithfully an internal map reflected the environment actually traversed.

The authors interpret these results through a context-dependent integration account of cognitive map formation. On this view, temporal and spatial information are flexibly weighted depending on environmental structure and the format of the representation being built. Time is not merely an accompanying factor in navigation but an active ingredient that biases spatial judgments, particularly distance estimation, and its influence depends on the availability of landmarks and the representational format involved.

The significance statement accompanying the paper frames the practical stakes. Everyday navigation, whether walking through unfamiliar buildings, driving in complex road networks, or following GPS-based guidance, depends on how people form internal maps of space, and those maps are often systematically distorted, particularly in dynamic, time-constrained environments such as hospitals, airports, or urban traffic systems. Traditional approaches to improving navigation have focused on optimizing spatial information, through clearer signage, more salient landmarks, or more precise digital maps, while the temporal dimension has gone largely unexamined.

By identifying the conditions under which such distortions emerge, the study suggests that navigation errors may arise not only from insufficient spatial information but also from how temporal and spatial information are integrated. The authors point to potential applications in the design of navigation systems, including digital mapping tools, in-vehicle guidance interfaces, and spatial training programs in complex environments.

The work offers a mechanistic explanation for systematic spatial distortions and highlights the role of the spatiotemporal properties of navigation in cognitive map construction. As the authors note, the findings support a model in which the brain flexibly weighs where it has been against how long it took to get there, and the resulting mental map reflects that negotiation rather than a simple survey of space.

Subject of Research: How temporal and spatial information integrate during cognitive map formation

Article Title: Spatiotemporal properties in cognitive map formation: context-dependent effects of landmarks and perspective

Article References: Huang, L., Zhang, J., Meng, K., Li, K., Wang, J., & Ji, M. (2026). Spatiotemporal properties in cognitive map formation: context-dependent effects of landmarks and perspective. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-026-00751-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s41235-026-00751-9

Keywords: cognitive maps, spatial navigation, virtual reality, landmarks, distance estimation, perspective, sketch mapping, spatial memory, wayfinding, GPS navigation, Spatiotemporal, properties