Last night, over a seafood dinner at Halifax's Five Fisherman restaurant, Ken Hill described the trail system in nearby Hemlock Ravine Park (where I'm headed later today) as an "island maze" (i.e. this is a maze where no heuristic such as, keep making lefts, will get you out; research subjects he's taken out here can and do circle through the path system endlessly). I asked Hill who designed the paths originally. "I don't know," he said, "the Devil?"
A few years back, the park's overseers were getting so many complaints from people who got lost in the trails that they put up several "You Are Here" signs. According to Hill, these signs are "useless" and one is actually incorrect. We'll see. Hill says only one person he's ever tested out in this park (he walks them to a destination and asks them to lead him back to the starting point) has ever passed. "And that guy cheated," he explains. So, the pressure's off.
On another note, I forgot to post last week when I attended the Spatial Learning Conference at Harvard. It was focused on a theme I'm particularly interested in: individual differences. But, I attended only one of the days, because the majority of the presentations were about small-scale spatial ability (e.g. the ability to recognize a 3-d shape from different directions). It's an interesting bit of turbulence in the spatial cognition world between those who study large scale navigation and those who primarily focus on the small scale abilities. Researchers in both fields suggest some overlap in cognitive skills, but research by Mary Hegarty et al at UCSB showed that a self-rated sense-of-direction score (from a survey they developed) was a much better predictor of large-scale navigation than scores of small-scale spatial ability such as mental rotation. One exciting side note on this conference was learning, from one presenter, about a British autistic savant named Stephen Wiltshire who can draw amazingly detailed and proportionally accurate pictures of an unfamiliar city after a brief helicopter ride overhead.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Land of the Lost
I've booked my trip to Halifax (late May) to visit with Ken Hill, a psychologist at the St. Mary's University who researches lost-person behavior.
The quick story on Prof. Hill is that he started into this particular line of inquiry back in 1986 after volunteering in the search for a 9-year old boy who'd become lost in the Nova Scotia wilderness. After more than a week, they found the boy's body less than 3 kilometers from where he'd last been seen. So, Hill dedicated his research to making search-and-rescue more than just about covering as much ground as possible--coordinating search around probabilities based on behavior predictions that differ depending on who is lost--a 6 year old, a hunter, a bird watcher, an elderly person, etc.
Of course, there's a bit of Heisenberg uncertainty when trying to "study" lost person behavior. Hill can only get so close to his subject, and one of his tactics is to get subjects lost in the maze-like path system of a local park in Halifax. He's promised to get me lost, there, too.
Quick note: Nova Scotia (specifically its swampy wilderness areas) was dubbed the "Lost Person Capital of North America" by Canadian Geographic Magazine.
The quick story on Prof. Hill is that he started into this particular line of inquiry back in 1986 after volunteering in the search for a 9-year old boy who'd become lost in the Nova Scotia wilderness. After more than a week, they found the boy's body less than 3 kilometers from where he'd last been seen. So, Hill dedicated his research to making search-and-rescue more than just about covering as much ground as possible--coordinating search around probabilities based on behavior predictions that differ depending on who is lost--a 6 year old, a hunter, a bird watcher, an elderly person, etc.
Of course, there's a bit of Heisenberg uncertainty when trying to "study" lost person behavior. Hill can only get so close to his subject, and one of his tactics is to get subjects lost in the maze-like path system of a local park in Halifax. He's promised to get me lost, there, too.
Quick note: Nova Scotia (specifically its swampy wilderness areas) was dubbed the "Lost Person Capital of North America" by Canadian Geographic Magazine.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Except When It Isn't
Sorry. Long time, no blog. I had a phone conversation a few days ago with David Kraemer, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. To oversimplify, Kraemer is investigating the idea of "learning styles" (you know, the popular idea in education circles that we are either visual or verbal learners and that instructional materials should be so-catered ). There are other "learning styles" out there, too, but visual and verbal are two mainstays. But, it turns out there's not a great deal of scientific support for this, says Kraemer, at least not for the theory as it's popularly perceived (i.e. learning styles appear someplace on a visual-verbal continuum, and so the more visual you are the less verbal, etc).
Anyway, Kraemer's adding spatial learning to the visual mix, as differentiated from "object" visual learning (a 3-D vs. 2-D distinction). And, lucky for me, he's testing all of these learning styles as they affect (or don't) our ability to navigate. When I was in Philly, I explored a bunch of desktop virtual cities for him after I filled out a few questionnaires meant to determine if I was more of a verbal or visual or spatial learner, etc. The city explorations were all videos of routes. I floating through a dozen or so deserted intersections, sometimes turning and sometimes not. The testing broke down like this:
1. View pictures of solitary buildings and say whether or not they were part of the city you just explored.
2. View pictures of intersections and say whether you turned right or left, or went straight through, or if the intersection wasn't part of the city you just explored.
3. View a picture of an intersection and then a picture of another intersection elsewhere in the city. "Point" using designated keyboard buttons to indicate what direction the second intersection is from the first.
Before I go into how I did, two caveats. Kraemer's research is still in the pilot phase. He's only tested a couple dozen people, and he's like to test maybe three times that many for good comparative validity. Also, the tests themselves have been evolving (up to and beyond when I did them). For example, my "learning phase" included three looks at each city, whereas some folks only went through each route once, others twice. I was the first to get the benefit of a third time through. On the other hand, in the building ID tests, the view-twice group was shown pictures of buildings as they actually appeared during the city exploration (identical orientation, etc, rather than the whole building in isolation that I had to ID).
Here's something a little spooky. I was the only subject who tested as an equally visual and verbal learner, and I thought for sure the verbal would be advantaged. I'm also really close on the object-spatial distinction, with a slight (surprising) advantage to spatial.
There are some very interesting, albeit tentative findings regarding visual-verbal-spatial learners and how they performed on each of the three tasks. But Kraemer's asked me to hold off on publishing anything until he's run a lot more subjects through the same tasks. So, I'll just report my own performance.
1. In landmark ID accuracy, I was better than all but two subjects in the "view once" group, which Kraemer said was probably a more valid comparison due to the advantage the view-twice group had in that task. But, full disclosure: I was tied for worst performance among the view-twicers.
2. In the intersection test, I pretty much mopped the floor with the view-oncers (I was about 92 percent accurate, and second best was about 52 percent), and I beat all but two of the view-twicers.
3. In the pointing task, what researchers call the "judgement of relative direction," and what's considered the most spatial of all the tests, I was in the top three compared to all the view-oncers and in the top four compared to the view-twicers.
Sure, I was probably a more motivated subject than the average undergraduate in it for $20, and I'll await the results from more subjects to see if the trend of my above average performance continues. But I really think there's something to ponder here--either these tasks aren't really testing the abilities and skills required for real-world wayfinding, or this is evidence to support my suspicion that, despite how frequently I get lost, I have a very good sense of direction somewhere inside me that just needs to be properly tapped.
Interesting sidenote: Among the view-twicers, there was one subject that kicked everyone's ass, scoring tops in all three tasks and pointing like GPS, getting 65 percent correct in the judgement of relative direction task where the average (among everybody else) was about 22 percent. I hit 27 percent, btw. And that's right, I said HER score. This doesn't by itself mean the gender differences in navigation are all bogus, but it does fly in the face of stereotype.
Anyway, Kraemer's adding spatial learning to the visual mix, as differentiated from "object" visual learning (a 3-D vs. 2-D distinction). And, lucky for me, he's testing all of these learning styles as they affect (or don't) our ability to navigate. When I was in Philly, I explored a bunch of desktop virtual cities for him after I filled out a few questionnaires meant to determine if I was more of a verbal or visual or spatial learner, etc. The city explorations were all videos of routes. I floating through a dozen or so deserted intersections, sometimes turning and sometimes not. The testing broke down like this:
1. View pictures of solitary buildings and say whether or not they were part of the city you just explored.
2. View pictures of intersections and say whether you turned right or left, or went straight through, or if the intersection wasn't part of the city you just explored.
3. View a picture of an intersection and then a picture of another intersection elsewhere in the city. "Point" using designated keyboard buttons to indicate what direction the second intersection is from the first.
Before I go into how I did, two caveats. Kraemer's research is still in the pilot phase. He's only tested a couple dozen people, and he's like to test maybe three times that many for good comparative validity. Also, the tests themselves have been evolving (up to and beyond when I did them). For example, my "learning phase" included three looks at each city, whereas some folks only went through each route once, others twice. I was the first to get the benefit of a third time through. On the other hand, in the building ID tests, the view-twice group was shown pictures of buildings as they actually appeared during the city exploration (identical orientation, etc, rather than the whole building in isolation that I had to ID).
Here's something a little spooky. I was the only subject who tested as an equally visual and verbal learner, and I thought for sure the verbal would be advantaged. I'm also really close on the object-spatial distinction, with a slight (surprising) advantage to spatial.
There are some very interesting, albeit tentative findings regarding visual-verbal-spatial learners and how they performed on each of the three tasks. But Kraemer's asked me to hold off on publishing anything until he's run a lot more subjects through the same tasks. So, I'll just report my own performance.
1. In landmark ID accuracy, I was better than all but two subjects in the "view once" group, which Kraemer said was probably a more valid comparison due to the advantage the view-twice group had in that task. But, full disclosure: I was tied for worst performance among the view-twicers.
2. In the intersection test, I pretty much mopped the floor with the view-oncers (I was about 92 percent accurate, and second best was about 52 percent), and I beat all but two of the view-twicers.
3. In the pointing task, what researchers call the "judgement of relative direction," and what's considered the most spatial of all the tests, I was in the top three compared to all the view-oncers and in the top four compared to the view-twicers.
Sure, I was probably a more motivated subject than the average undergraduate in it for $20, and I'll await the results from more subjects to see if the trend of my above average performance continues. But I really think there's something to ponder here--either these tasks aren't really testing the abilities and skills required for real-world wayfinding, or this is evidence to support my suspicion that, despite how frequently I get lost, I have a very good sense of direction somewhere inside me that just needs to be properly tapped.
Interesting sidenote: Among the view-twicers, there was one subject that kicked everyone's ass, scoring tops in all three tasks and pointing like GPS, getting 65 percent correct in the judgement of relative direction task where the average (among everybody else) was about 22 percent. I hit 27 percent, btw. And that's right, I said HER score. This doesn't by itself mean the gender differences in navigation are all bogus, but it does fly in the face of stereotype.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
A Garden of Forking Paths
I'm compelled to mention that I spent my first five minutes in Providence yesterday walking circles around the train station trying to get my world to fit the Google Map print-out I had for directions to the VENLab. Once I found the place, I spent a few minutes with Bill Warren, who heads up this virtual reality navigation lab to go over the day's schedule. Then to the VENLab itself, which is a 50 by 50 foot converted chemistry lab, empty, until you put on the VR helmet.
I began the day as a subject in an experiment by doctoral student Liz Chrastil, who is testing the effects on navigation of active vs. passive learning. She has people learn to find objects in a virtual maze--some by walking, some in a wheelchair with no control, some in a wheelchair with some control (i.e. telling the researchers where to push them), and some simply watching a recorded video of somebody else exploring the maze. Then, she has them go from one object to another, either through the maze or directly with the maze shut off and replaced with a grey expanse of desert.
With the helmet secured, and a transmitter cinched around my waist, I sat in a wheelchair (my random draw was to be a passive learner) and looked out into a leafy green hedge maze. Below was a gravel path and above was an unblemished blue sky. Crickets chirped through the headphones I wore, interrupted frequently by Liz's recorded instructions. Unlike most hedge mazes, this one had famous works of art hung on its walls by Dali, Monet, Magritte, and Renoir. I glanced at them as I was whisked through the maze and brought before the various objects hidden in its branches--a pedestal sink, a giant stone gear, an old well, a floating Earth, a book case, a clock, and a statue of a rabbit frozen in mid-leap (like a bad day in Narnia).
I didn't get a chance to ask the researchers how they managed to push me through a maze that they can't see, but "managed" is an apt word in this case, because I was frequently thrust through walls by accident and given glimpses of the desert world beyond the maze. Also, there's a slight delay in virtual reality between the movement of one's head and the rendering of the images, which messes with your vestibular sense enough to make many people a little sea sick. Being pushed through such a world only adds to the fun. Clip a few walls while you're at it, and you quickly become much more engaged with your stomach than your place in Euclidian space.
I sound like I'm making excuses, and maybe I am. Truth is, I have no idea how much my simmering nausea in the learning phase affected my performance in the testing. Probably, enough people have the same trouble that it should all come out in the comparative wash. Anyway, I was given the short-cut task, repeatedly wheeled through the desert to a spot where the wishing well or the bookcase or the sink, would appear momentarily when I stood up and clicked a mouse, and then disappear again. Liz's recorded voice would tell me a second object. My job was to turn through the desert in the direction I believed the second object to be and then walk there (well, shuffle there. balance is tough in the virtual world).
I'll admit, this task was very difficult. And sometimes a little terrifying: The VENLab is equipped with a system to warn subjects enjoying a shuffle through a sunny virtual world that they're about to walk into a very real brick wall. It goes like this: An image of a brick wall springs into view and a stern, robotic voice yells out, "STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP!"
Good idea, I've rambled on far too long here. I'll catch up on the rest of my VENLab visit in the next post.
I began the day as a subject in an experiment by doctoral student Liz Chrastil, who is testing the effects on navigation of active vs. passive learning. She has people learn to find objects in a virtual maze--some by walking, some in a wheelchair with no control, some in a wheelchair with some control (i.e. telling the researchers where to push them), and some simply watching a recorded video of somebody else exploring the maze. Then, she has them go from one object to another, either through the maze or directly with the maze shut off and replaced with a grey expanse of desert.
With the helmet secured, and a transmitter cinched around my waist, I sat in a wheelchair (my random draw was to be a passive learner) and looked out into a leafy green hedge maze. Below was a gravel path and above was an unblemished blue sky. Crickets chirped through the headphones I wore, interrupted frequently by Liz's recorded instructions. Unlike most hedge mazes, this one had famous works of art hung on its walls by Dali, Monet, Magritte, and Renoir. I glanced at them as I was whisked through the maze and brought before the various objects hidden in its branches--a pedestal sink, a giant stone gear, an old well, a floating Earth, a book case, a clock, and a statue of a rabbit frozen in mid-leap (like a bad day in Narnia).
I didn't get a chance to ask the researchers how they managed to push me through a maze that they can't see, but "managed" is an apt word in this case, because I was frequently thrust through walls by accident and given glimpses of the desert world beyond the maze. Also, there's a slight delay in virtual reality between the movement of one's head and the rendering of the images, which messes with your vestibular sense enough to make many people a little sea sick. Being pushed through such a world only adds to the fun. Clip a few walls while you're at it, and you quickly become much more engaged with your stomach than your place in Euclidian space.
I sound like I'm making excuses, and maybe I am. Truth is, I have no idea how much my simmering nausea in the learning phase affected my performance in the testing. Probably, enough people have the same trouble that it should all come out in the comparative wash. Anyway, I was given the short-cut task, repeatedly wheeled through the desert to a spot where the wishing well or the bookcase or the sink, would appear momentarily when I stood up and clicked a mouse, and then disappear again. Liz's recorded voice would tell me a second object. My job was to turn through the desert in the direction I believed the second object to be and then walk there (well, shuffle there. balance is tough in the virtual world).
I'll admit, this task was very difficult. And sometimes a little terrifying: The VENLab is equipped with a system to warn subjects enjoying a shuffle through a sunny virtual world that they're about to walk into a very real brick wall. It goes like this: An image of a brick wall springs into view and a stern, robotic voice yells out, "STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP!"
Good idea, I've rambled on far too long here. I'll catch up on the rest of my VENLab visit in the next post.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Pushing on the pull door
Since I began my lab-ratting, I've been filling out a lot of "rate your own sense of direction" or "rate your own spatial abilities" questionnaires. There are usually a series of statements, such as, "I very easily get lost in a new city" or "When I'm in a complex building, I can easily visualize what's outside the building in the direction I'm looking" and then you are asked to answer with varying levels of agreement ranging from strong agreement to strong disagreement.
Here's one of my favorites: "I always know if a chair will fit through my front door before buying it." Now, I've never bought a chair so large that there was any doubt that it would fit through my front door. But I do have experience trying to move a massive armoire into a second-floor apartment I was sharing with my sister. We had three people pushing and lifting, but the thing got stuck at a turn in the stairs. We managed to inch it up and forward through a series of twisting, lurching and cursing maneuvers, but after half an hour or so, we knew we were beaten. Then the real trouble started, because by this point we couldn't get it down the stairs either. It was pinned. We phoned an extra large friend for emergency help. He arrived just in time before my sister went to find an axe.
Here's another one: "It's not important to me to know where I am." It must be nice. But then again, aren't you curious?
And one more: "I enjoy reading maps." I do. I love maps. I like reading maps so much that I look at maps of places where I have no prospect of ever going. Likewise, I love historical maps (in the case of Boston, I like tracing the streets that once were bays, busy with merchant ships; I like to imagine the farm that was cut up in the late 1800s to create my neighborhood). Yet, I still get lost all the time. And my suspicion is that the assumption behind this question is that the more you enjoy maps, the more spatially oriented you are generally. So, it makes me wonder...
Here's one of my favorites: "I always know if a chair will fit through my front door before buying it." Now, I've never bought a chair so large that there was any doubt that it would fit through my front door. But I do have experience trying to move a massive armoire into a second-floor apartment I was sharing with my sister. We had three people pushing and lifting, but the thing got stuck at a turn in the stairs. We managed to inch it up and forward through a series of twisting, lurching and cursing maneuvers, but after half an hour or so, we knew we were beaten. Then the real trouble started, because by this point we couldn't get it down the stairs either. It was pinned. We phoned an extra large friend for emergency help. He arrived just in time before my sister went to find an axe.
Here's another one: "It's not important to me to know where I am." It must be nice. But then again, aren't you curious?
And one more: "I enjoy reading maps." I do. I love maps. I like reading maps so much that I look at maps of places where I have no prospect of ever going. Likewise, I love historical maps (in the case of Boston, I like tracing the streets that once were bays, busy with merchant ships; I like to imagine the farm that was cut up in the late 1800s to create my neighborhood). Yet, I still get lost all the time. And my suspicion is that the assumption behind this question is that the more you enjoy maps, the more spatially oriented you are generally. So, it makes me wonder...
On and Off the Grid
I'll be making a return visit to the VEN (Virtual Reality Environment) Lab at Brown University tomorrow. Bill Warren, department chair and professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences, heads up the lab. He was kind enough to let me don the VR headgear and explore the virtual worlds of his lab back in 2003 for a Boston Globe feature I wrote on navigation research (my initiation into this research). Lucky for me, I had a researcher "wrangler" following me around while I explored to keep my feet clear of the wires connecting the VR headgear to the computers, and keep my face clear of oncoming brick walls.
Since 1999, Warren has used these virtual worlds to investigate all aspects of how humans "path integrate" (i.e. how well we track our own distance and direction over time as we move, independent of landmarks). A really good path integrator should be able to follow a circuitous path and take a shortcut back "home" and should, after enough exploration, start developing an accurate sense of how far and in what direction any location in an environment is from any other--in short, a Euclidian cognitive map.
A common test of path integration skill is to have people walk two legs of a triangle in a virtual desert, then have them turn and walk the third leg back to the starting point without any visual aids. After that, the researchers often start messing around... adding landmarks to see if that changes anything, and then moving landmarks to see if you notice, etc.
Generally, Warren has found humans to be pretty bad at path integrating. Recently, he's taken aim at the theory that we're ever capable of building up a Euclidian cognitive map. He's had people learn locations and routes in a virtual hedge maze and then secretly introduced "wormholes" within the maze that magically transport people to those locations. A Euclidian cognitive map would cry foul at such geometric dislocation, says Warren, but "nobody has found anything amiss."
Tomorrow, Warren will show me the wormholes. I'll also continue trying to diagnose my own sense of direction with the help of post-doc Mintao Zhao who is looking into what happens when path-integration and landmarks compete and with doctoral student Liz Chrastil who will run me through a battery of basic skills tests and have me take part in her active-vs-passive learning experiments.
Since 1999, Warren has used these virtual worlds to investigate all aspects of how humans "path integrate" (i.e. how well we track our own distance and direction over time as we move, independent of landmarks). A really good path integrator should be able to follow a circuitous path and take a shortcut back "home" and should, after enough exploration, start developing an accurate sense of how far and in what direction any location in an environment is from any other--in short, a Euclidian cognitive map.
A common test of path integration skill is to have people walk two legs of a triangle in a virtual desert, then have them turn and walk the third leg back to the starting point without any visual aids. After that, the researchers often start messing around... adding landmarks to see if that changes anything, and then moving landmarks to see if you notice, etc.
Generally, Warren has found humans to be pretty bad at path integrating. Recently, he's taken aim at the theory that we're ever capable of building up a Euclidian cognitive map. He's had people learn locations and routes in a virtual hedge maze and then secretly introduced "wormholes" within the maze that magically transport people to those locations. A Euclidian cognitive map would cry foul at such geometric dislocation, says Warren, but "nobody has found anything amiss."
Tomorrow, Warren will show me the wormholes. I'll also continue trying to diagnose my own sense of direction with the help of post-doc Mintao Zhao who is looking into what happens when path-integration and landmarks compete and with doctoral student Liz Chrastil who will run me through a battery of basic skills tests and have me take part in her active-vs-passive learning experiments.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Philly, Back Again
I'm late with this post, but the few days since my return from Philly have been crazy, so I'm just getting to it. I spent my second day with the navigation researchers taking part in a truncated version of an experiment they've been running to test if and how people of differing navigational abilities improve on a wayfinding task over time.
We traveled to a satellite campus of Temple University about 50 miles north of Philly early last Thursday morning. Once there, I waited by the car while the researchers, Victor Schinazi of Penn and Dan Nardi of Temple, went off to set things up. They returned with a wheelchair, a blindfold, and a portable radio with headphones. All of it was for me--once in the chair, blindfolded, and oblivious to all sound but the grunge rock radio station, I was wheeled in circles to disorient me and then pushed through the campus. I was released at the starting point of "route one," a fairly short, albeit circuitous path (about two tenths of a mile, I'd guess) connecting four buildings that I was told to learn as we walked. I was then summoned back into my dark, Nirvana-fueled wheelchair, spun in circles again, then pushed to another part of campus where we arrived a few minutes later to walk "route two."
After that, it was back into the dark, Alice in Chains, more spinning, and a return to route one. This time, at each building, Victor and Dan told me to point to every other building in this route and in the unseen route two, and they checked my pointing with an electronic compass. My pointing had to be stiff armed and straight-fingered (Grim Reaperish) to ensure an accurate compass reading. I have no idea what the groups of passing students thought of our little group, but I'll never forget the looks as I arose from my wheelchair and began pointing (seemingly) at several of them.
Ok, so, then: dark, Soundgarden, spinning, route two, and the same walking and pointing task. After all this, I was wheeled back to a mystery room and asked to close my eyes and pretend I was walking both routes, pointing all the while. Finally, a very long questionnaire that asked me to judge the distances between all the buildings in each route.
After lunch, we started phase two (which in the normal experiment would happen a week later). Victor and Dan showed me a curving connector path between the two routes. Then we did all the rolling, spinning, pointing stuff again at both routes, the imaginary route pointing, and the questionnaire. Normal subjects would return for a third go-round, at which time they would be shown a second connecting route. Another part of the research I skipped due to time constraints is the follow-up fMRI.
Anyway, the point of all this is to see if and how people improve from one trial to the next. It builds on a very similar experiment conducted a few years ago by Daniel Montello and Toru Ishikawa who found that subjects broke into three groups--some improved steadily, but "most participants either manifested accurate metric knowledge from the first session or never manifested accurate metric knowledge." In other words, their findings indicated that for the majority of us, when it comes to navigational acumen, you either got it or you don't.
Victor and Dan screened their subjects to make sure they have never been to this campus and promise to refrain from investigating it independently. And in the first trial, navigation performance is all over the place. Some people are weirdly, shockingly accurate with their pointing and distance estimations. Others make errors that defy basic logic. In deference to their yet-to-be-published data, I won't reveal more about what Dan and Victor have found. But I will as soon as everything is in press and I have the chance to get their comparative analysis of my own pointing performance.
We traveled to a satellite campus of Temple University about 50 miles north of Philly early last Thursday morning. Once there, I waited by the car while the researchers, Victor Schinazi of Penn and Dan Nardi of Temple, went off to set things up. They returned with a wheelchair, a blindfold, and a portable radio with headphones. All of it was for me--once in the chair, blindfolded, and oblivious to all sound but the grunge rock radio station, I was wheeled in circles to disorient me and then pushed through the campus. I was released at the starting point of "route one," a fairly short, albeit circuitous path (about two tenths of a mile, I'd guess) connecting four buildings that I was told to learn as we walked. I was then summoned back into my dark, Nirvana-fueled wheelchair, spun in circles again, then pushed to another part of campus where we arrived a few minutes later to walk "route two."
After that, it was back into the dark, Alice in Chains, more spinning, and a return to route one. This time, at each building, Victor and Dan told me to point to every other building in this route and in the unseen route two, and they checked my pointing with an electronic compass. My pointing had to be stiff armed and straight-fingered (Grim Reaperish) to ensure an accurate compass reading. I have no idea what the groups of passing students thought of our little group, but I'll never forget the looks as I arose from my wheelchair and began pointing (seemingly) at several of them.
Ok, so, then: dark, Soundgarden, spinning, route two, and the same walking and pointing task. After all this, I was wheeled back to a mystery room and asked to close my eyes and pretend I was walking both routes, pointing all the while. Finally, a very long questionnaire that asked me to judge the distances between all the buildings in each route.
After lunch, we started phase two (which in the normal experiment would happen a week later). Victor and Dan showed me a curving connector path between the two routes. Then we did all the rolling, spinning, pointing stuff again at both routes, the imaginary route pointing, and the questionnaire. Normal subjects would return for a third go-round, at which time they would be shown a second connecting route. Another part of the research I skipped due to time constraints is the follow-up fMRI.
Anyway, the point of all this is to see if and how people improve from one trial to the next. It builds on a very similar experiment conducted a few years ago by Daniel Montello and Toru Ishikawa who found that subjects broke into three groups--some improved steadily, but "most participants either manifested accurate metric knowledge from the first session or never manifested accurate metric knowledge." In other words, their findings indicated that for the majority of us, when it comes to navigational acumen, you either got it or you don't.
Victor and Dan screened their subjects to make sure they have never been to this campus and promise to refrain from investigating it independently. And in the first trial, navigation performance is all over the place. Some people are weirdly, shockingly accurate with their pointing and distance estimations. Others make errors that defy basic logic. In deference to their yet-to-be-published data, I won't reveal more about what Dan and Victor have found. But I will as soon as everything is in press and I have the chance to get their comparative analysis of my own pointing performance.
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