Reorientation in a Two-Dimensional Environment: I. Do Adults Encode the Featural and Geometric Properties of a Two-Dimensional Schematic of a Room?

Kelly, Debbie M.; Spetch, Marcia L.

doi:10.1037/0735-7036.118.1.82

Cited by 41 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 37 publications

(79 reference statements)

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“…This suggests that participants were able to orient equally well in the absence of either local geometric cue. The accurate orientation when angular information was removed is not surprising, given the numerous previous demonstrations of orientation in rectangular environments (Cheng, 1986;Kelly & Spetch, 2004a, b;Sturz & Kelly, 2009). However, the equally high accuracy on the rhombus test is interesting, for a couple reasons.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our experiment was designed after the procedure that has been used with chicks and pigeons to test whether angles are encoded, and how they are weighted when placed in conflict with both wall lengths and a principal axis. In the present experiment, adult humans were tested in a first-person navigable virtual environment similar to that used in many other studies of orientation strategies (e.g., Kelly & Gibson, 2007;Sturz, Gurley, & Bodily, 2011). Participants were trained to locate two geometrically equivalent corners in a parallelogramshaped room.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Geometric orientation by humans: angles weigh in

2012

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Human participants were trained to navigate to two geometrically equivalent corners of a parallelogramshaped virtual environment. The unique shape of the environment combined three distinct types of geometric information that could be used in combination or in isolation to orient and locate the goals: the angular amplitudes of the corners, the relative wall length relationships, and the principal axis of symmetry. In testing, participants were placed in manipulated versions of the training environment that tested which types of geometry they had encoded and how angular information weighed in against the other two geometric properties. The test environments were (a) a rectangular environment that removed the angular information, (b) a rhombic environment that removed wall length information and drastically reduced the principal axis, and (c) a reverse-parallelogram-shaped environment that placed angular information against both wall length and principal axis information. Participants chose accurately in the rectangular and rhombus environments, despite the removal of one of the cues. In the conflict test, participants preferred corners with the correct angular amplitudes over corners that were correct according to both wall length relationships and the principal axis. These results are comparable to recent findings with pigeons and suggest that angles are a salient orientation cue for humans.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Geometric orientation by humans: angles weigh in

2012

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“…overshadowing). Interestingly, however, overshadowing was not found when pigeons (Kelly et al 1998), fishes (Sovrano et al 2003), rats (Wall et al 2004), or humans (Kelly & Spetch 2004) were trained with both featural and geometric information simultaneously; all species spontaneously used geometry to find the correct corner when the featural information was removed. Furthermore, chicks trained to locate a beacon in the middle of a square arena continued to focus their search in the centre of the arena when tested without the beacon (Tommasi & Vallortigara 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial encoding in mountain chickadees: features overshadow geometry

et al. 2005

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Encoding the global geometric shape of an enclosed environment is a principal means of orientation in human and non-human animals. Animals spontaneously encode the geometry of an enclosure even when featural information is available. Although features can be used, they typically do not overshadow geometry. However, all previously tested organisms have been reared in human-made environments with salient geometrical cues. Here, we show that wild-caught mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli ) do not spontaneously encode the geometry of an enclosure when salient features are present near the goal. However, chickadees trained without salient features encode geometric information, but this encoding is overshadowed by features.

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“…Indeed, the facilitation of geometry by features has also been shown in rats (Pearce et al 2001Graham et al 2006), humans (Kelly & Spetch 2004a) and pigeons (Kelly & Spetch 2004b), and an attempt to explain these findings has been modelled by Miller & Shettleworth (2007. In this model, it is assumed that the relative total associative strength of cues at a spatial location determines whether an organism will choose that location.…”

Section: What Information Is Actually Encoded? (A) Bearings and Geomementioning

confidence: 99%

What scatter-hoarding animals have taught us about small-scale navigation

Gould

Kelly

Kamil³

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Many animals use cues for small-scale navigation, including beacons, landmarks, compasses and geometric properties. Scatter-hoarding animals are a unique system to study small-scale navigation. They have to remember and relocate many individual spatial locations, be fairly accurate in their searching and have to remember these locations for long stretches of time. In this article, we review what is known about cue use in both scatter-hoarding birds and rodents. We discuss the importance of local versus global cues, the encoding of bearings and geometric rules, the use of external compasses such as the Sun and the influence of the shape of experimental enclosures in relocating caches or hidden food. Scatter-hoarding animals are highly flexible in how and what they encode. There also appear to be differences in what scatter-hoarding birds and rodents encode, as well as what scatter-hoarding animals in general encode compared with other animals. Areas for future research with scatter-hoarding animals are discussed in light of what is currently known.

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Reorientation in a Two-Dimensional Environment: I. Do Adults Encode the Featural and Geometric Properties of a Two-Dimensional Schematic of a Room?

Cited by 41 publications

References 37 publications

Geometric orientation by humans: angles weigh in

Geometric orientation by humans: angles weigh in

Spatial encoding in mountain chickadees: features overshadow geometry

What scatter-hoarding animals have taught us about small-scale navigation

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