Strolling Through The Park From Hell

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.

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.