Dissociating position and heading estimations: Rotated visual orientation cues perceived after walking reset headings but not positions

Mou, Weimin; Zhang, Lei

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.010

Cited by 23 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In an environment with stable visual landmarks for piloting, the path integrator actually shuts down, so the navigator is completely disoriented if landmarks unexpectedly vanish (Zhao and Warren, 2015a). Moreover, familiar visual landmarks act to reset the path integrator (both orientation and position) in humans (Mou and Zhang, 2014;Zhang and Mou, 2017;Zhao and Warren, 2015b) as in animals (Etienne et al, 2004;Knierim et al, 1998). Such a system is well suited for making local, piecewise measurements of rough travel distances and turn angles and registering them in a cognitive graph.…”

Section: Building a Cognitive Graphmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-Euclidean navigation

Warren

2019

Journal of Experimental Biology

104

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A basic set of navigation strategies supports navigational tasks ranging from homing to novel detours and shortcuts. To perform these last two tasks, it is generally thought that humans, mammals and perhaps some insects possess Euclidean cognitive maps, constructed on the basis of input from the path integration system. In this article, I review the rationale and behavioral evidence for this metric cognitive map hypothesis, and find it unpersuasive: in practice, there is little evidence for truly novel shortcuts in animals, and human performance is highly unreliable and biased by environmental features. I develop the alternative hypothesis that spatial knowledge is better characterized as a labeled graph: a network of paths between places augmented with local metric information. What distinguishes such a cognitive graph from a metric cognitive map is that this local information is not embedded in a global coordinate system, so spatial knowledge is often geometrically inconsistent. Human path integration appears to be better suited to piecewise measurements of path lengths and turn angles than to building a consistent map. In a series of experiments in immersive virtual reality, we tested human navigation in non-Euclidean environments and found that shortcuts manifest large violations of the metric postulates. The results are contrary to the Euclidean map hypothesis and support the cognitive graph hypothesis. Apparently Euclidean behavior, such as taking novel detours and approximate shortcuts, can be explained by the adaptive use of non-Euclidean strategies.

show abstract

Section: Building a Cognitive Graphmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-Euclidean navigation

Warren

2019

Journal of Experimental Biology

104

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Conversely, in a similar experiment by Zhao and Warren [24], participants primarily used visual allothetic information, often ignoring body-based idiothetic cues even when the mismatch was as large as 90 • , consistent with a cue competition strategy. Similar discrepancies exist across the literature, with some studies supporting cue combination (and even optimal Bayesian cue combination) [23][24][25][26][27], and others more consistent with cue competition [24,[28][29][30][31].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Combination and competition between path integration and landmark navigation in the estimation of heading direction

Harootonian

Ekstrom

Wilson

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Successful navigation requires the ability to compute one’s location and heading from incoming multisensory information. Previous work has shown that this multisensory input comes in two forms: body-based idiothetic cues, from one’s own rotations and translations, and visual allothetic cues, from the environment (usually visual landmarks). However, exactly how these two streams of information are integrated is unclear, with some models suggesting the body-based idiothetic and visual allothetic cues are combined, while others suggest they compete. In this paper we investigated the integration of bodybased idiothetic and visual allothetic cues in the computation of heading using virtual reality. In our experiment, participants performed a series of body turns of up to 360 degrees in the dark with only a brief flash (300ms) of visual feedback en route. Because the environment was virtual, we had full control over the visual feedback and were able to vary the offset between this feedback and the true heading angle. By measuring the effect of the feedback offset on the angle participants turned, we were able to determine the extent to which they incorporated visual feedback as a function of the offset error. By further modeling this behavior we were able to quantify the computations people used. While there were considerable individual differences in performance on our task, with some participants mostly ignoring the visual feedback and others relying on it almost entirely, our modeling results suggest that almost all participants used the same strategy in which idiothetic and allothetic cues are combined when the mismatch between them is small, but compete when the mismatch is large. These findings suggest that participants update their estimate of heading using a hybrid strategy that mixes the combination and competition of cues.

show abstract

“…Although visual and self-motion cues may be optimally integrated to reduce the variability of spatial judgments (e.g., Chen et al 2017;Nardini et al 2008), these cues often compete to determine the direction in which a navigator should go (Tcheang et al 2011;Zhao & Warren 2015b). Visual cues often "veto" self-motion cues when they provide conflicting estimates of orientation or location; when such conflict becomes substantially large, the dominance reverts to self-motion cues (Foo et al 2005;Mou & Zhang 2014;Zhang & Mou 2017;Zhao & Warren 2015b; see Cheng et al 2007 for a review). This competition between visual and selfmotion information occurs in both human and nonhuman animal navigation and manifests in terms of both behavioral and neurophysiological responses (e.g., Etienne & Jeffery 2004;Yoder et al 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimality is both elusive and necessary

Meyer

2018

Behav Brain Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Optimality of any decision, including perceptual decisions, depends on the criteria used to evaluate outcomes and on the assumptions about available alternatives and information. In research settings, these are often difficult to define, and therefore, claims about optimality are equivocal. However, optimality is important in applied settings when evaluating, for example, the detection of abnormalities in medical images.

show abstract

Dissociating position and heading estimations: Rotated visual orientation cues perceived after walking reset headings but not positions

Cited by 23 publications

References 37 publications

Non-Euclidean navigation

Non-Euclidean navigation

Combination and competition between path integration and landmark navigation in the estimation of heading direction

Optimality is both elusive and necessary

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About