Mental Rehearsal to Enhance Navigation Learning

Abstract

In an effort to test mental rehearsal as an energy efficient way to learn spatial navigation tasks, a maze navigation simulation was constructed. A robot driven by a single layer feed forward neural network had to find its way from its starting location to a target location. The task was learned using mental and physical rehearsal and learned by using only physical rehearsal. Performance was compared between trials with and trials without the use of mental rehearsal. As a result we found that mental rehearsal has a slightly positive effect on performance measure of the robot in the maze navigation task.