Wayfinding across ocean and tundra: what traditional cultures teach us about navigation

Fernandez-Velasco, Pablo; Spiers, Hugo J.

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2023.09.004

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 93 publications

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“…We propose that licensed London taxi drivers provide an exceptional opportunity to meet this challenge. London taxi drivers are unique in the world for their knowledge of street networks and navigational expertise (Fernandez Velasco and Spiers 2024). They are unique with respect to their vast experience and standardized expert training of the London street network (Griesbauer, 2022b), and they have been well characterized in prior studies exploring cognition, brain function and structural changes as a result of expertise (Maguire et al, 2000; Maguire, Woollett & Spiers, 2006; Maguire, Nannery & Spiers, 2006; Spiers & Maguire, 2006a,b, 2007a,b,c, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expert Navigators Deploy Rational Complexity-Based Decision Prioritization for Large-Scale Real-World Planning

Fernandez Velasco,

Griesbauer,

Brunec

et al. 2024

Preprint

Self Cite

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Efficient planning is a distinctive hallmark of human intelligence. Computational analyses of human behavior during planning provide evidence for hierarchically segmented representations of the state space of options. However, such evidence derives from simplistic tasks with small state-spaces that belie the complexity of real-world planning. Here, we examine the street-by-street route plans of London taxi drivers navigating across more than 26,000 streets in London (UK). Response times were faster for states with higher successor representations, providing evidence for predictive mapping. We also find an effect for the interaction between the successor representation of a state and local transition entropy, which indicates hierarchical chunking of transition sequences, and thus provides real-world support to existing theories of hierarchical state-space representations and planning. Finally, we explored how planning unfolded dynamically over different phases of the constructed journey and identify theoretic principles by which expert planners rationally prioritize specific states during the planning process. Overall, our findings provide real-world evidence for predictive maps and rational hierarchical prioritization in expert route planning.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expert Navigators Deploy Rational Complexity-Based Decision Prioritization for Large-Scale Real-World Planning

Fernandez Velasco,

Griesbauer,

Brunec

et al. 2024

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Animals and humans are capable of extraordinary feats of navigation, from birds migrating by following magnetic fields [Packmor et al, 2021], to rodents navigating mazes [Small, 1901] and cab drivers memorizing and traversing nearly 26000 busy London streets [Fernandez-Velasco and Spiers, 2023]. In the brain, navigation ability is believed to be supported by Hippocampal place cells [O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971, O’Keefe and Nadel, 1978].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Conjunctive Representations

Pettersen,

Rogge,

Lepperød

2024

Preprint

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Hippocampal place cells are known for their spatially selective firing patterns, which has led to the suggestion that they encode an animal’s location. However, place cells also respond to contextual cues, such as smell. Furthermore, they have the ability to remap, wherein the firing fields and rates of cells change in response to environmental changes. How place cell responses emerge, and how these representations remap is not fully understood. In this work, we propose a similarity-based objective function that translates proximity in space, to proximity in representation. We show that a neural network trained to minimize the proposed objective learns place-like representations. We also show that the proposed objective is trivially extended to include other sources of information, such as context information, in the same way. When trained to encode multiple contexts, networks learn distinct representations, exhibiting remapping behaviors between contexts. The proposed objective is invariant to orthogonal transformations. Such transformations of the original trained representation (e.g. rotations), therefore yield new representations distinct from the original, without explicit relearning, akin to remapping. Our findings shed new light on the formation and encoding properties of place cells, and also demonstrate an interesting case of representational reuse.

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“…Experimental conditions often differ from real-world navigation, and empirical approaches might gain experimental control at the expense of ecological validity. Ethnographic work in anthropology can help inform the study of wayfinding by documenting how it unfolds within particular cognitive-cultural ecosystems (Fernandez-Velasco and Spiers, 2023). Nevertheless, the diversity of human cultures of wayfinding has led to diverging views within anthropology, which can be divided into two overarching theoretical camps: 'mental maps theory' and 'practical mastery theory'.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental maps, practical mastery and environmental experience: an analysis of the wayfinding culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters

Fernández Velasco,

Gleizer

2023

J. Navigation

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The present work explores the link between navigational processes and the experience of place by considering the case of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters. Our analysis shows how the idiosyncratic wayfinding methods of the Evenki result in a unique experience of place – a case that elucidates the important question of the impact of navigational processes on environmental experience, and that advances the debate between mental map theory and practical mastery theory in anthropology. We defend that their wayfinding methods – involving a particular gait, path networks, and vast hydrological and toponymical knowledge – allow the Evenki to navigate without a need for integrating egocentric and allocentric frames of reference. As a result, the Evenki experience themselves as free individuals moving through an environment that is alive and rife with possibility. This analysis reveals the ways in which wayfinding processes relying predominantly on route knowledge – as opposed to survey knowledge – affect environmental experience. Alternative methods of wayfinding can be seen as a form of resistance to the uniformisation of landscapes, and as a way of embracing the heterogeneity of space.

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Wayfinding across ocean and tundra: what traditional cultures teach us about navigation

Cited by 9 publications

References 93 publications

Expert Navigators Deploy Rational Complexity-Based Decision Prioritization for Large-Scale Real-World Planning

Expert Navigators Deploy Rational Complexity-Based Decision Prioritization for Large-Scale Real-World Planning

Learning Conjunctive Representations

Mental maps, practical mastery and environmental experience: an analysis of the wayfinding culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters

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