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.