Lost in Virtual Space: Studies in Human and Ideal Spatial Navigation

Stankiewicz, B.J., Legge, G. E., Mansfield, J. S., & Schlicht, E. J. (2006). Lost in Virtual Space: Studies in Human and Ideal Spatial Navigation. In Press. Journal of Experimenal Psychology: Human Perception & Performance. 32(3), 688-704.

An internal representation of the space is usually referred to as a cognitive map. To develop an understanding of human spatial navigation, it is important to understand how the cognitive map is developed and the nature of its representation. This paper describes three human spatial navigation experiments that investigate how limitations of perception, memory, uncertainty and decision strategy affect human spatial navigation. The authors present a model designed to navigate through visual sparse indoor environments that contain perceptual ambiguity. First experiment found that participants’ way finding efficiency decreased as layout size increased. Experiment 2 investigated whether this reduction in navigation efficiency was due to visual perception. Experiment 3 investigated if it was due to memory, spatial updating strategy, or decision strategy. Results suggest that the inefficiency in Experiment 1 is due to inefficiency in the participant’s spatial updating strategy.

The key properties of the model’s spatial navigation task are:

• Perception: perceptual input like two-dimensional and stereo depth visual images, auditory cues, kinesthetic feedback from joints and muscles
• Spatial updating: ability to determine our location and heading in a large-scale space given our knowledge about the environment (cognitive map) and the sequence of specific observations and actions while navigating.
• Decision strategy: set of actions to move from one state in the environment to another.
• Navigation goal: to formalize a spatial navigation task one needs to specify the goal. The most common spatial navigation goal is to travel from one known location to another known location.

These properties are used to investigate where the cognitive limitations might exist in spatial navigation. Experiment 3 might be the most related to my research because it deals with give supplementary information made available to the participant. It had three conditions, No-Map, Map and Map + Belief Vector.

Findings of experiment 3 suggest that participants did not have difficulty in accessing their cognitive map, or that the global information afforded by the supplementary map was not useful to them. Future research will investigate the contribution on navigating behavior when navigating with uncertainty of:

• accurately updating a belief vector given an action
• generating the candidate states given an observation
• accurately updating a belief vector given an action
• accurately eliminating candidate states given the current observation

In the discussion, the author mention navigating with uncertainty:

The present studies suggest that participants have difficulty navigating when there is state uncertainty. The three experiments show that the major factor in participants’ inefficient navigation behavior lies in the methods they use to update their belief vector. Within this updating procedure, there are four specific procedures; any one of them, or a combination of inefficient processing, can lead to the inefficient behaviors found in the present experiments. These subprocesses include the following: (a) generate all of the states that are consistent with the current observation, (b) remember the candidate states, (c) update this collection of states on the basis of the most recent action; and (d) eliminate the candidate states that are inconsistent with the current view. Any or all of these processes may have produced the inefficient behavior found in these studies.

Relation to my thesis: Maps and location-aware systems are mediums to help create and update cognitive maps of physical/virtual spaces. Here I am digging into spatial navigation and spatial cognition. Spatial navigation is composed of multiple processes that include perception, memory, spatial updating and decision making. This study investigate our navigating skills when there is uncertainty about our current state in the environment and their is very visual information to reduce the ambiguity. The paper describes well how the psycho experiment was run. That is observing and then testing hypothesis with different conditions. The authors use desktop virtual to investigate way-finding behavior. The question is if the results will actually generalize to navigation under more realistic conditions. It would be good to find references on such spatial navigation/cognition experiments in real-world settings. The paper bring several useful concepts such as:

• Perceptual ambiguity
• Cognitive map (Hirtle and Heidorn 1993; Kuipers, 2001; O’Keefe & Nadel, 1978; Tolman, 1948). The concept of a cognitive map has influenced how researchers describe the ultimate representation that we obtain after extensive exploration of a large-scale space.
• Belief vector, the list of states that the participan could be in given their previous observations and actions.