TY - GEN
T1 - Humans construct survey estimates on the fly from a compartmentalised representation of the navigated environment
AU - Meilinger, Tobias
AU - Henson, Agnes
AU - Rebane, Jonathan
AU - Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
AU - Mallot, Hanspeter A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements. This work was supported by the DFG grant ME 3476/2-1. We would like to thank Joachim Tesch for help with the virtual environment setup.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Despite its relevance for navigation surprisingly little is known about how goal direction bearings to distant locations are computed. Behavioural and neuroscientific models proposing the path integration of previously navigated routes are supported indirectly by neural data, but behavioral evidence is lacking. We show that humans integrate navigated routes post-hoc and incrementally while conducting goal direction estimates. Participants learned a multi-corridor layout by walking through a virtual environment. Throughout learning, participants repeatedly performed pairwise pointing from the start location, end location, and each turn location between segments. Pointing latency increased with the number of corridors to the target and decreased with pointing experience rather than environmental familiarity. Bimodal pointing distributions indicate that participants made systematic errors, for example, mixing up turns or forgetting segments. Modeling these error sources suggests that pointing did not rely on one unified, but rather multiple representations of the experimental environment. We conclude that participants performed incremental on-the-fly calculations of goal direction estimates within compartmentalised representations, which was quicker for nearby goals and became faster with repeated pointing. Within navigated environments humans do not compute difference vectors from coordinates of a globally consistent integrated “map in the head”.
AB - Despite its relevance for navigation surprisingly little is known about how goal direction bearings to distant locations are computed. Behavioural and neuroscientific models proposing the path integration of previously navigated routes are supported indirectly by neural data, but behavioral evidence is lacking. We show that humans integrate navigated routes post-hoc and incrementally while conducting goal direction estimates. Participants learned a multi-corridor layout by walking through a virtual environment. Throughout learning, participants repeatedly performed pairwise pointing from the start location, end location, and each turn location between segments. Pointing latency increased with the number of corridors to the target and decreased with pointing experience rather than environmental familiarity. Bimodal pointing distributions indicate that participants made systematic errors, for example, mixing up turns or forgetting segments. Modeling these error sources suggests that pointing did not rely on one unified, but rather multiple representations of the experimental environment. We conclude that participants performed incremental on-the-fly calculations of goal direction estimates within compartmentalised representations, which was quicker for nearby goals and became faster with repeated pointing. Within navigated environments humans do not compute difference vectors from coordinates of a globally consistent integrated “map in the head”.
KW - Spatial learning
KW - Survey knowledge
KW - Virtual environments
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85053551074&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-96385-3_2
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-96385-3_2
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85053551074
SN - 9783319963846
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 15
EP - 26
BT - Spatial Cognition XI - 11th International Conference, Spatial Cognition 2018, Proceedings
A2 - Klippel, Alexander
A2 - Creem-Regehr, Sarah
A2 - Schöning, Johannes
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 11th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, 2018
Y2 - 5 September 2018 through 8 September 2018
ER -