Piloting and path integration within and across boundaries.

Mou, Weimin; Lin, Wang

doi:10.1037/xlm0000032

Cited by 27 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…This supports views that environments are represented by a manifold of spatial maps (Derdikman & Moser, 2010; Han & Becker, 2014; Mou & Wang, 2015) rather than one unitary spatial map. In the case of unitary spatial maps, simulation speeds should not vary with spatial coherence and vividness, as the same representation is being used to make predictive inferences in all cases.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

Mental simulation of routes during navigation involves adaptive temporal compression

2016

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Mental simulation is a hallmark feature of human cognition, allowing features from memories to be flexibly used during prospection. While past studies demonstrate the preservation of real-world features such as size and distance during mental simulation, their temporal dynamics remains unknown. Here, we compare mental simulations to navigation of routes in a large-scale spatial environment to test the hypothesis that such simulations are temporally compressed in an adaptive manner. Our results show that simulations occurred at 2.39x the speed it took to navigate a route, increasing in compression (3.57x) for slower movement speeds. Participant self-reports of vividness and spatial coherence of simulations also correlated strongly with simulation duration, providing an important link between subjective experiences of simulated events and how spatial representations are combined during prospection. These findings suggest that simulation of spatial events involve adaptive temporal mechanisms, mediated partly by the fidelity of memories used to generate the simulation.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

Mental simulation of routes during navigation involves adaptive temporal compression

2016

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“…While we did not collect eye-tracking data to verify exactly where participants fixated, facing angle during navigation provided some insight into what aspects of the spatial layout participants attended to (Ekstrom et al, 2003). Together, our findings support ideas from the navigation and attentional literature that representations are updated during navigation (Burgess, 2006;Mou & Wang, 2015;Wang & Spelke, 2000) and that "top-down" and "bottom-up" mechanisms during navigation are integrated versus dichotomized (Awh et al, 2012), respectively.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

Verbal cues flexibly transform spatial representations in human memory

Peacock

Ekstrom

2018

Memory

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Humans possess a unique ability to communicate spatially-relevant information, yet the intersection between language and navigation remains largely unexplored. One possibility is that verbal cues accentuate heuristics useful for coding spatial layouts, yet this idea remains largely untested. We test the idea that verbal cues flexibly accentuate the coding of heuristics to remember spatial layouts via spatial boundaries or landmarks. The alternative hypothesis instead conceives of encoding during navigation as a step-wise process involving binding lower-level features, and thus subsequently formed spatial representations should not be modified by verbal cues. Across three experiments, we found that verbal cues significantly affected pointing error patterns at axes that were aligned with the verbally cued heuristic, suggesting that verbal cues influenced the heuristics employed to remember object positions. Further analyses suggested evidence for a hybrid model, in which boundaries were encoded more obligatorily than landmarks, but both were accessed flexibly with verbal instruction. These findings could not be accounted for by a tendency to spend more time facing the instructed component during navigation, ruling out an attentional-encoding mechanism. Our findings argue that verbal cues influence the heuristics employed to code environments, suggesting a mechanism for how humans use language to communicate navigationally-relevant information.

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“…A second reason people easily get lost in complex indoor spaces arises from research on reference frames. A large body of evidence (Diwadkar & McNamara, 1997;McNamara, Rump, & Werner, 2003;Meilinger, Riecke, & Bülthoff, 2014;Meilinger, Frankenstein, Watanabe, Bülthoff, & Hölscher, 2015;Mou & McNamara, 2002;Mou, McNamara, & Zhang, 2013;Mou & Wang, 2015;Roskos-Ewoldsen, McNamara, Shelton, & Carr, 1998;Shelton & McNamara, 2004) supports the idea that spatial knowledge is stored in a preferred reference frame. A reference frame is a spatial representation in which objects or other representations of space are contained, or with respect to which they are ordered, oriented, located, or thought to move; a preferred reference frame is an orientation in which a spatial layout is most easily recalled.…”

mentioning

confidence: 84%

Feel the way with a vibrotactile compass: Does a navigational aid aid navigation?

Weisberg

Badgio

Chatterjee

2017

Preprint

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Knowing where north is provides a navigator with invaluable information for learning and recalling a space, particularly in places with limited navigational cues, like complex indoor environments. Although north is effectively used by orienteers, pilots, and military personnel, very little is known about whether non-expert populations can or will use north to create an accurate representation of an indoor space. In the current study, we taught people two non-overlapping routes through a complex indoor environment, with which they were not familiar – a university hospital with few windows and several turns. Along one route, they wore a vibrotactile compass on their arm, which vibrated continuously indicating the direction of north. Along the other route, they were only told where north was at the start of the route. At the beginning, the end, and back at the beginning of each route, participants pointed to well-known landmarks in the surrounding city and campus (external landmarks), and newly-learned landmarks in the hospital (internal landmarks). We found improved performance with the compass only for external landmarks, driven by people’s use of the availability of north to orient these judgments. No such improved orientation occurred for the internal landmarks. These findings reveal the utility of vibrotactile compasses for learning new indoor spaces. We speculate that such cues help users map new spaces onto familiar spaces or to familiar reference frames.

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Piloting and path integration within and across boundaries.

Cited by 27 publications

References 49 publications

Mental simulation of routes during navigation involves adaptive temporal compression

Mental simulation of routes during navigation involves adaptive temporal compression

Verbal cues flexibly transform spatial representations in human memory

Feel the way with a vibrotactile compass: Does a navigational aid aid navigation?

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