tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1723621297217220822011-07-29T01:42:40.127-07:00The Art and Science of Turning the Wrong WayChris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.comBlogger151100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-66931315343747011192010-05-28T06:47:00.000-07:002010-05-28T06:50:18.973-07:00

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

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-48992600076708265742010-05-03T07:34:00.000-07:002010-05-03T07:34:28.968-07:00

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

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-47991360725655746022010-04-22T13:14:00.000-07:002010-04-23T07:43:57.429-07:00

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

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-7397892964070228322010-04-07T06:29:00.000-07:002010-04-27T10:17:28.242-07:00

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

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-64277176051267921342010-04-05T12:54:00.000-07:002010-04-05T19:09:29.205-07:00

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

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-7876991640514235162010-04-05T10:59:00.000-07:002010-04-05T11:10:44.749-07:00

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

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-43289763192695338082010-03-31T10:09:00.000-07:002010-03-31T10:09:03.741-07:00

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

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-34290185049534258152010-03-24T18:48:00.000-07:002010-03-24T22:47:30.589-07:00

This is going to be a short post. I need to write it, but I have the brain power of a turnip right now, so I won't go into detail. I've just returned from a 9-hour day of navigation testing at the University of Pennsylvania. Fittingly, the day began with me marching seven blocks in the wrong direction while trying to walk from my bed-and-breakfast to Penn's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-36322416834007479522010-03-17T07:23:00.000-07:002010-03-26T17:27:44.891-07:00

In a few days, I leave for Philadelphia where some navigation researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University will do their best to diagnose my sense of direction. The tricky part is that most labs investigating human wayfinding aren't set up to evaluate individuals. They focus on how the mind reacts to certain navigational cues, what brain areas are activated, and what

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-45266708612138313612010-03-10T06:23:00.000-08:002010-03-24T22:45:46.818-07:00

I called up Toru Ishikawa, a navigation researcher at the University of Tokyo, last night (the next morning for him). We talked about his research into how GPS affects our ability to learn our way around a new place. Two years ago, he had about 60 men and women learn a short route through a residential suburb of Tokyo--one third with no navigational aid, one third with paper maps, and one third

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-75375851905354750192010-03-09T09:13:00.000-08:002010-03-09T10:37:54.234-08:00

I'm five posts into this blog, and I haven't yet explained myself. In my family, I'm known as the one who gets lost. My dad, who used to sell steel all over the world, would wander around Karachi, Dacca, and Mumbai the day he arrived and take shortcuts back to his hotel. My brother, separated from the rest of us in a mall at age two, found his way back to our car and sat on the hood to await his

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-61074594699875566132010-03-05T06:46:00.000-08:002010-03-12T05:43:28.286-08:00

Speaking of Thomas Wolbers (see previous post). He's a co-author (with Mary Hegarty ) of an article in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences that lays out a model for investigating why some of us are hardly ever lost while others of us, ahem, have the sense of direction of a loaf of bread. The paper, "What determines our navigational abilities" uses existing literature on human

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-34346621590721247672010-03-04T12:42:00.000-08:002010-03-12T05:52:52.471-08:00

A friend sent me this recent post on msnbc.com's Body Odd  blog. I've only heard of one other search for human wayfinding genes, a genome-wide association study by Thomas Wolbers at the University of Edinburgh (no published results yet from that study, as far as I know), but I'll bet we see many more such studies soon: Always lost? It may be in your genesPosted on Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-62872160593126445142010-03-04T10:33:00.000-08:002010-03-05T05:50:11.300-08:00

Big navigation news out of University College London. In last month's Nature, a group of UCL researchers wrote that they'd found evidence of "grid cells" in the human brain. Scientists have known for a while that rodent brains have these "grid cells," whose accumulated firings map a triangular grid as the animal explores an open area.  They are just one of several specialized navigation neurons

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-172362129721722082.post-34327851152423774512010-03-04T06:36:00.000-08:002010-03-04T07:59:38.316-08:00

There ought to be a word for the way you know how to get some place but don't remember the names of streets the number of turns and blinking yellow lights so that if someone asked you really couldn't say except you know the road starts out straight and when it's sunny the branches blink across the windshield making you want to rub your eyes then the road turns sharply uphill past a red barn

Chris Berdikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09566212345855263055noreply@blogger.com1