Learning to navigate: Experience versus maps

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 129; no. 1; pp. 24 - 30
• Main Authors: Meilinger, Tobias, Frankenstein, Julia, Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.10.2013; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Biological and medical sciences; Error; Everyday life; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Knowledge; Learning; Learning - physiology; Learning. Memory; Male; Maps as Topic; Memory; Middle Aged; Navigation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reference frame; Route knowledge; Space Perception - physiology; Spatial Behavior - physiology; Spatial memory; Survey knowledge; Surveys; User-Computer Interface; Virtual environment; Young Adult; Survey knowledge; Route knowledge; Navigation; Virtual environment; Reference frame; Spatial memory; Human; Memory; Spatial orientation; Cognition; Experimental study; Knowledge; Learning; Acquisition process; Virtual reality; Comparative study; Spatial representation; Frame of reference
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.05.013

•We compared long-term residents’ route and survey knowledge.•Both were uncorrelated and relied on different reference frames.•Route knowledge was orientation-free, or employed multiple local reference frames.•Route knowledge was likely acquired from navigation, survey knowledge from maps.•Navigators seem to flexibly employ best suited sources for route and survey tasks. People use “route knowledge” to navigate to targets along familiar routes and “survey knowledge” to determine (by pointing, for example) a target’s metric location. We show that both root in separate memories of the same environment: participants navigating through their home city relied on representations and reference frames different from those they used when doing a matched survey task. Tübingen residents recalled their way along a familiar route to a distant target while located in a photorealistic virtual 3D model of Tübingen, indicating their route decisions on a keyboard. Participants had previously done a survey task (pointing) using the same start points and targets. Errors and response latencies observed in route recall were completely unrelated to errors and latencies in pointing. This suggests participants employed different and independent representations for each task. Further, participants made fewer routing errors when asked to respond from a horizontal walking perspective rather than a constant aerial perspective. This suggests that instead of the single reference, north-up frame (similar to a conventional map) they used in the survey task, participants employed different, and most probably multiple, reference frames learned from “on the ground” navigating experience. The implication is that, within their everyday environment, people use map or navigation-based knowledge according to which best suits the task.