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.