Gender differences in spatial navigation: Characterizing wayfinding behaviors

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Men show a consistent spatial navigation advantage over women, which is often attributed to their increased use of survey spatial strategies. But what about...     

The Giessen virtual environment laboratory: human wayfinding and landmark salience

In our virtual environment laboratory, we focus on different topics in human spatial cognition with projects on landmark salience, route knowledge, and survey knowledge. Within this laboratory note, we provide an overview of previous, current, and future work with our virtual environment Squareland.     

Mental rotation and real-world wayfinding

Sex differences in mental rotation skills are a robust finding in small-scale laboratory-based studies of spatial cognition. There is almost no evidence in the literature, however, relating these skills to performance on spatial tasks in large-scale, real-world activities such as navigating in a new city or in the woods. This study investigates the connections between mental rotation skills as measured by the Vandenburg-Kuse Mental Rotations test and the performance of college students (n=211) navigating a 6-km orienteering course. The results indicate that mental rotation skills are significantly correlated with wayfinding performance on an orienteering task. The findings also replicate sex differences in spatial ability as found in laboratory-scale studies. However, the findings complicate the discussion of mental rotation skills and sex because women often performed as well as men despite having lower mean test scores. This suggests that mental rotation ability may not be as necessary for some women's wayfinding as it is for men's navigation.     

Escape: wayfinding strategies and emergency

Index

List of Authors     

Cue combination in human spatial navigation

This project investigated the ways in which visual cues and bodily cues from self-motion are combined in spatial navigation. Participants completed a homing task in an immersive virtual environment. In Experiments 1A and 1B, the reliability of visual cues and self-motion cues was manipulated independently and within-participants. Results showed that participants weighted visual cues and self-motion cues based on their relative reliability and integrated these two cue types optimally or near-optimally according to Bayesian principles under most conditions. In Experiment 2, the stability of visual cues was manipulated across trials. Results indicated that cue instability affected cue weights indirectly by influencing cue reliability. Experiment 3 was designed to mislead participants about cue reliability by providing distorted feedback on the accuracy of their performance. Participants received feedback that their performance with visual cues was better and that their performance with self-motion cues was worse than it actually was or received the inverse feedback. Positive feedback on the accuracy of performance with a given cue improved the relative precision of performance with that cue. Bayesian principles still held for the most part. Experiment 4 examined the relations among the variability of performance, rated confidence in performance, cue weights, and spatial abilities. Participants took part in the homing task over two days and rated confidence in their performance after every trial. Cue relative confidence and cue relative reliability had unique contributions to observed cue weights. The variability of performance was less stable than rated confidence over time. Participants with higher mental rotation scores performed relatively better with self-motion cues than visual cues. Across all four experiments, consistent correlations were found between observed weights assigned to cues and relative reliability of cues, demonstrating that the cue-weighting process followed Bayesian principles. Results also pointed to the important role of subjective evaluation of performance in the cue-weighting process and led to a new conceptualization of cue reliability in human spatial navigation.     

Updating egocentric representations in human navigation

Seven experiments tested whether human navigation depends on enduring representations, or on momentary egocentric representations that are updated as one moves. Human subjects pointed to unseen targets, either while remaining oriented or after they had been disoriented by self-rotation. Disorientation reduced not only the absolute accuracy of pointing to all objects ('heading error') but also the relative accuracy of pointing to different objects ('configuration error'). A single light providing a directional cue reduced both heading and configuration errors if it was present throughout the experiment. If the light was present during learning and test but absent during the disorientation procedure, however, subjects showed low heading errors (indicating that they reoriented by the light) but high configuration errors (indicating that they failed to retrieve an accurate cognitive map of their surroundings). These findings provide evidence that object locations are represented egocentrically. Nevertheless, disorientation had little effect on the coherence of pointing to different room corners, suggesting both (a) that the disorientation effect on representations of object locations is not due to the experimental paradigm and (b) that room geometry is captured by an enduring representation. These findings cast doubt on the view that accurate navigation depends primarily on an enduring, observer-free cognitive map, for humans construct such a representation of extended surfaces but not of objects. Like insects, humans represent the egocentric distances and directions of objects and continuously update these representations as they move. The principal evolutionary advance in animal navigation may concern the number of unseen targets whose egocentric directions and distances can be represented and updated simultaneously, rather than a qualitative shift in navigation toward reliance on an allocentric map.     

Characterizing the role of strategic disposition and orientation to risk in wayfinding

Although digital navigation systems are becoming ubiquitous, they generally only select routes based on relatively simple criteria (length and time) and fail to adequately consider the preferred strategy of the user. In order to account for these strategies, care must be taken to solicit not only simple preferences, but also deeper issues such as overall strategic disposition and attitudes toward risk. Hallmarks of true strategy include schematic, general, conditional and conscious consideration of the impact of important variables on the achievement of one’s goals. Factor analysis of a 40-item questionnaire isolated five questions that well-account for the strategic disposition of individuals. Additionally, attitudes about risk were explored in pedestrian and driving contexts. This analysis suggests that within the individual, attitudes about risk are relatively fixed, yet the manifestation of risk-seeking behavior is dependent on the mode of travel.     

Parahippocampal and retrosplenial contributions to human spatial navigation

Spatial navigation is a core cognitive ability in humans and animals. Neuroimaging studies have identified two functionally defined brain regions that activate during navigational tasks and also during passive viewing of navigationally relevant stimuli such as environmental scenes: the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and the retrosplenial complex (RSC). Recent findings indicate that the PPA and RSC have distinct and complementary roles in spatial navigation, with the PPA more concerned with representation of the local visual scene and RSC more concerned with situating the scene within the broader spatial environment. These findings are a first step towards understanding the separate components of the cortical network that mediates spatial navigation in humans.     

Embodied memories: Reviewing the role of the body in memory processes

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - This review aims at exploring the role of the body and its sensorimotor processes in memory. Recent theories have suggested that memories can profitably be seen...     

Counting processes in human timing

A subject reproducing a long duration, t, may time out either a single interval of duration t or a succession of n intervals, each of duration t/n. It is shown that a class of timing models obeying Weber’s law predicts the variance of reproductions of t to be a decreasing function of the number of subdivisions, n. In contrast, a second class of proportional variance models, which includes Creelman’s pulse counter model (1962), predicts no change in the variance as a function of n. Data are presented from a duration reproduction experiment in which subjects counted silently at a specified rate up to a given number and then responded. Several statistics involving the variance of the reproduced durations are shown to be predicted significantly better by the Weber’s law class of models than by the proportional variance class of models.     

Towards an understanding of the psychodynamic processes of the body

Abstract

Counselling clients frequently mention bodily symptoms, yet, within the therapy world, the body largely remains off-limits. This, in some part, is undoubtedly due to the prevailing issues around the touch taboo. However, the symptoms emanating from the body may well have profound psychodynamic meaning. This paper sets out to describe a psychodynamic perspective for how these symptoms may arise. Notions such as libido and preverbal theories, along with primal defence mechanisms, are used to show how the body becomes involved in unconscious processes. A case study is presented as illustrative of some of the psychodynamic concepts that may be implicated. It is argued that bodywork may help in providing a preverbal supportive environment from which a therapeutic alliance may develop, thus allowing for a verbalization of unconscious conflict.     

Comparison and expectancy processes in human judgment

This work explored a judgment model proposed by Manis and Paskewitz (1984a). The model suggests that prior experience with the members of a given category affects the assessment of other category members in 2 ways: (a) by providing a basis for comparison and (b) by leading the judge to expect that new exemplars will resemble those previously encountered. In 4 experiments, respondents judged the height of different people on the basis of full-length photographs. The height of the models in an induction series constituted the main independent variable. The effects of contrasting inductions (e.g., short vs. tall women) affected the judges' subsequent assessments in a test series. Both comparison and expectancy processes played a significant role, sometimes opposing one another and sometimes acting in parallel (i.e., supporting one another).     

On the assessment of landmark salience for human navigation

In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for assessing the salience of landmarks for navigation. Landmark salience is derived as a result of the observer’s point of view, both physical and cognitive, the surrounding environment, and the objects contained therein. This is in contrast to the currently held view that salience is an inherent property of some spatial feature. Salience, in our approach, is expressed as a three-valued Saliency Vector. The components that determine this vector are Perceptual Salience, which defines the exogenous (or passive) potential of an object or region for acquisition of visual attention, Cognitive Salience, which is an endogenous (or active) mode of orienting attention, triggered by informative cues providing advance information about the target location, and Contextual Salience, which is tightly coupled to modality and task to be performed. This separation between voluntary and involuntary direction of visual attention in dependence of the context allows defining a framework that accounts for the interaction between observer, environment, and landmark. We identify the low-level factors that contribute to each type of salience and suggest a probabilistic approach for their integration. Finally, we discuss the implications, consider restrictions, and explore the scope of the framework.     

Specifying the human body configuration

Three experiments investigated the specific spatial relations that define the human body configuration. In Experiment 1, participants searched for scrambled bodies amongst normal distractors. In Experiments 2 and 3 participants were asked to identify whether single body images (upright or inverted) were scrambled or normal. Scrambled bodies had head or limbs displaced to either symmetrical or asymmetrical positions. Experiment 1 showed that asymmetrical violations are recognized faster than symmetrical violations. All three experiments revealed that when the number of structural violations is held constant, head violations are recognized faster than limb violations. Experiment 3 also showed a greater inversion effect for scrambled bodies that maintained head on top and vertical symmetry, providing evidence that these are key spatial relations in the human body configuration. Overall, the results supported our hypothesis that the human body configuration is defined primarily by a head at the apex of a vertically symmetrical body.     

The roles of beaconing and dead reckoning in human virtual navigation

Beaconing is a process in which the distance between a visual landmark and current position is reduced in order to return to a location. In contrast, dead reckoning is a process in which vestibular, kinesthetic and/or optic flow cues are utilized to update speed of movement, elapsed time of movement, and direction of movement to return to a location. In the present experiment, human participants engaged in a virtual triangle-completion task devoid of vestibular cues in which they navigated two legs of an outbound path before homing (returning to the origin). However, our task was modified such that a landmark array was placed at the origin, allowing both beaconing and dead reckoning to be utilized to home. During the second leg of the outbound path, we manipulated aspects of the landmark array to determine the extent to which beaconing and dead reckoning influenced homing. Specifically, during probe trials, the landmark array either remained the same, shifted 3 or 6 meters east/west, or north/south, or was removed. We analyzed homing performance to determine the influence of landmark shifts on search behavior. Results suggested that participants were able to home with equal accuracy in both the presence and the absence of the landmark array. Array shifts that put beaconing and dead reckoning in conflict resulted in an averaging of the two sources of information for the determination of heading but a mixture of strategies for path length.