Reorienting with terrain slope and landmarks

Abstract

Orientation (or reorientation) is the first step in navigation, because establishing a spatial frame of reference is essential for a sense of location and heading direction. Recent research on nonhuman animals has revealed that the vertical component of an environment provides an important source of spatial information, in both terrestrial and aquatic settings. Nonetheless, humans show large individual and sex differences in the ability to use terrain slope for reorientation. To understand why some participants-mainly women-exhibit a difficulty with slope, we tested reorientation in a richer environment than had been used previously, including both a tilted floor and a set of distinct objects that could be used as landmarks. This environment allowed for the use of two different strategies for solving the task, one based on directional cues (slope gradient) and one based on positional cues (landmarks). Overall, rather than using both cues, participants tended to focus on just one. Although men and women did not differ significantly in their encoding of or reliance on the two strategies, men showed greater confidence in solving the reorientation task. These facts suggest that one possible cause of the female difficulty with slope might be a generally lower spatial confidence during reorientation.Keywords Individual and sex differences . Spatial abilities . Reorientation . Slope . Geographical slant . Spatial confidence Few everyday cognitive abilities exhibit individual differences as marked as those seen in navigation tasks. It is apparent that some people are extremely good at finding their way, while others struggle and experience anxiety during the journey (e.g., Lawton, 1994;Schinazi, Epstein, Nardi, Newcombe, & Shipley, 2009). The complexity of the navigation process makes it difficult to understand the source of such variability in performance-after all, successful navigation depends on many component skills (e.g., perception, spatial memory, position updating, and construction of a mental map of the environment). Here we focus on the first step that any mobile animal encounters when navigating: establishing where it is and which direction it is facing. This step, often called orientation, or reorientation when orientation has been lost, is accomplished when a navigator identifies a key element of the environment (e.g., a sign, specific landmark, or familiar sound).A central question in the reorientation literature is whether any of these spatial cues has a more important role (is more salient) than others. For example, at least in small spaces, the geometric shape of the environment determined by bounding walls (e.g., in a room) seems to be a particularly strong type of reorienting cue-so strong that nonhuman animals (Cheng, 1986) and human children (Hermer & Spelke, 1994 tend to focus on this cue and disregard other, potentially more useful cues. However, the strength of geometric cues appears to wane as the space grows larger (Learmonth, Nadel, & Newcombe, 2002), for a variety of reasons that in...

I believe I’m good at orienting myself… But is that true?

“…(2) women report a lower level of confidence in the accuracy of drawing a floor plan of a building even if no gender differences are revealed in solving the task (O'Laughlin and Brubaker 1998); (3) women report significantly more uncertainty about carrying out a wayfinding task although there is no gender difference in route choice (Lawton et al 1996); (4) women express less confidence in distance estimation tasks (Foley and Cohen 1984); (5) although men and women do not differ significantly in their encoding of or reliance on the same strategies in spatial orientation tasks, men show greater confidence in solving them than women do (Nardi et al 2013) and last but not least (6) women self-reported general lower spatial skills than men (Hegarty et al 2002). This demonstrates that gender differences can affect feelings towards spatial abilities and competence in solving spatial tasks as well as performance in laboratory tasks.…”

Sex differences and errors in the use of terrain slope for navigation

“…Another possible interpretation is that women might have a more conservative criterion for judging slope, not lower sensitivity. Relevant to this, it has been found that, when choices and confidence in making said choices were separately measured, women only displayed lower confidence in localizing the target using the slope (Nardi et al 2013). Inferior spatial confidence for females has also been shown in different contexts (e.g., cognitive mapping task: O'Laughlin and Brubaker 1998), and the way it affects spatial behavior should be explored more in depth.…”

“…However, this prioritization has only been demonstrated with steep inclinations (20°) and using non-human animal models (homing pigeons). In human studies, which have used non-comparable experimental procedures (e.g., shallower inclinations), the slope does not seem to dominate over other cues (Kelly 2011;Nardi et al 2013).…”

Where is Uphill? Exploring Sex Differences When Reorienting on a Sloped Environment Presented through 2-D Images

“…When only the slope gradient is available for reorientation, the female disadvantage seems to be related to a decreased likelihood of noticing the floor tilt that, however, is not due to the footwear worn during the experiment or to footwear habits (Holmes et al, under review;Nardi et al, 2011Nardi et al, , 2013. Interestingly, sex differences with slope in richer and larger environments, where other cues are available, have not been found (Restat, Steck, Mochnatzki, & Mallot, 2004;Weisberg & Newcombe, in press), suggesting that environment complexity may play a modulatory role.…”