Spatial cognition: the return path

Spatial cognition: the return path Kai Hamburger (kai.hamburger@psychol.uni-giessen.de) Lena E. Dienelt (lena-eowyn.dienelt@psychol.uni-giessen.de) Marianne Strickrodt (marianne.strickrodt@psychol.uni-giessen.de) Florian Roser (florian.roeser@psychol.uni-giessen.de) Justus Liebig University Giessen, Department of Psychology, Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10 F 35394 Giessen, Germany goal without being distracted or being led into a wrong direction? Or, would it be better to supplement the verbal description with a map, or maybe make only use of the map instead? This is not only a question of not getting lost (e.g., Dudchenko, 2010), but also a question about cognitive economy, namely, reaching the goal with the least cognitive or physical effort. Let us assume that we successfully reached the goal. We are now faced with a new, maybe more difficult, problem. We need to return to our hotel! Finding a return path is an everyday problem but has rarely been investigated empirically (retrace the same route; e.g., Golledge, 1997, Buchner, Holscher, & Strube, 2007; Papinski, Scott, & Doherty, 2009). We are able to manage this task, but we do not yet know the underlying cognitive and neural processes enabling us to find the return path. One of the most important aspects for the return path is probably the structure of the environment (e.g., structural landmark salience; Sorrows & Hirtle, 1999; Klippel & Winter, 2005). Since we assume visual salience (or better perceptual salience) –that is how much an object stands out from its environment (e.g., Caduff & Timpf, 2008)– and semantic salience of landmarks –that is for example its name, meaning, or function (e.g., Hamburger & Knauff, 2011)– to be less important, we here try to control for these aspects and rather focus on the structural aspects as we have done in several previous experiments on structural salience (e.g., Roser, Hamburger, Krumnack, & Knauff, 2012a; Roser, Krumnack, Hamburger, & Knauff, 2012b). There are two optimal positions for landmarks to be located on a regular/initial path: before the intersection (Klippel & Winter, 2005) in direction of the turn and behind the intersection in direction of the turn (Roser et al., 2012a). Most important is that the landmark is located somewhere in direction of the turn (Roser et al., 2012a). But, for the return path, two different positions might be the optimal ones: the positions before the intersection in direction of the turn and behind the intersection opposite to the direction of the turn. These positions are invariant for the return path (they remain unchanged). The other two positions are variant, since they have to be mentally and verbally transformed for the return path (e.g., “before the intersection opposite to the direction of turn” becomes “behind the intersection and in direction of the turn” on the way back). Further details on Abstract The cognitive representation of a return path is a rather unexplored topic including different issues, e.g., perception, mental imagery, mental spatial processing, and language. We here investigated the return path with landmarks located on different positions (optimal, suboptimal). Participants learned a total of 24 routes and had to produce the return paths (N=20). In a second experiment the different positions plus map learning versus verbal directions were investigated (N=20). Both experiments reveal that the position of a landmark at an intersection (structural salience) has an influence on wayfinding performance. However, the results are somehow ambiguous. Therefore, we also present first approaches for predicting behavior (e.g., optimal route descriptions) and for modeling the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in finding the return path, including visibility, structural salience, mental representation/ transformation, and language. Keywords: return path; structural salience; landmarks; mental transformation Introduction Imagine that you are on a vacation in an unknown foreign city. After your arrival at the hotel you want to explore the surroundings and maybe visit a place of interest or a touristic feature (e.g., a famous building such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris). You may base your search on different means for successfully reaching your goal. You may want to use a verbal description that you received at the reception desk of your hotel, maybe you want to make use of a city map in your tourist guide, or, if you do not have these means at hand, you may want to ask a pedestrian on the street for giving you directions to your goal location. There is also the possibility of using a mobile navigation system. This latter example is part of the debate on “extended cognition” (e.g., Clark & Chalmers, 1998), which is beyond the scope of this project. Here, the focus is rather on the “innate” navigation system, perceptual and cognitive processes that enable humans to navigate without getting lost (most of the times). In general, wayfinders use so-called landmarks, objects or buildings that stand out of their environment, to aid navigation (e.g., Lynch, 1960; Presson & Montello, 1988; Caduff & Timpf, 2008). Let us return to our initial example. One important question is whether the verbal description is on its own sufficient for reaching the