Acquisition of route and survey knowledge in the absence of vision

The ability of sighted, blindfolded individuals to navigate while walking was assessed in two types of tasks, one requiring knowledge of a route that previously had been navigated and another requiring more complex spatial inference or computation. A computerized measurement system monitored spatial position. The route tasks included maintenance of a heading, distance and turn reproduction and estimation, and turn production. The inferential task required completion of a multisegment pathway by returning directly to the origin. pathways were replicated at two different scales. Measures for the route-knowledge tasks indicated a substantial ability to navigate in the absence of visual cues. Route reproduction performance was particularly accurate despite intrinsic veering tendencies. A substantial increase in error was observed in the pattern-completion task. Errors in pathway completion increased with pathway complexity and were quite similar in the two scales. Correlational data suggested that performance on different route-knowledge tasks reflected differing underlying representations. The completion task led to a high correlation between absolute turn and distance error but had minimal correlations with the route tasks. The data suggest that a survey representation with some degree of scale independence was constructed for use in the pathway completion task.     

Authors and publication practices

Although authors are usually considered to be the main perpetrators of research and publication misconduct, any person involved in the process has the potential to offend. Editors may breach ethical standards particularly with respect to conflicts of interest. In the same way that authors are now required to declare competing interests, notably commercial affiliations, financial interests and personal connections, so must editors. Editors can influence the chances of acceptance or rejection of a paper by reviewer selection. Reviewers should also be ready to disclose conflicts of interest. They must ensure that their reviews are evidence based and free from destructive criticism driven by self interest. It seems likely that ultimately we will progressively move towards 'open' peer review in which both the authors and the reviewers are known to each other. There is an urgent need for increased transparency of the relationship between editors and owners. The events of the last few years indicate that unless this interface is fully understood by all parties, conflicts may arise. There is also a need for a radical overhaul in the relationship between journals, journal editors and the biomedical industry. It is now increasingly accepted that all clinical trials should be registered in a centrally held database and that protocols should include the primary and secondary outcome measures and the intended approach to data analysis thereby avoiding opportunistic post hoc analyses. However, the even more radical proposal that journals should cease to publish clinical trials sponsored by industry deserves wider debate.