We know from our previous research that people are exquisitely sensitive to optic flow information for heading. To get through a door, then, one could simply move so that the doorway expands symmetrically in the field of view. In order to test these and other hypotheses, we can use VR to violate the laws of optics by creating doorways that expand in anomalous ways, and then record how subjects walk through them. Thus far, whether steering through doorways, down hallways, around obstacles, or in a slalom course, people appear to behave more like honeybees than Descartes might have guessed. This is exciting because it suggests that there are a few stable solutions that disparate species with very different brains have discovered independently and that robots might also exploit.
Biology capitalizes on informational and physical regularities to organize behavior.
But it seems likely to us that the spatial knowledge that is necessary to navigate is much more qualitative and partial, and that clever navigational strategies would build upon the kinds of basic visual behaviors described above. In these experiments, subjects wear a head-mounted display and walk around in a virtual environment, learning the spatial layout as they try to find specific destinations. This may lead us to simpler navigation strategies that can be implemented and tested in mobile robots. I would be quite satisfied if it were possible to develop a non-Cartesian account of perception and action alone. But my suspicion is that such an understanding of basic visual behavior may give us a platform upon which higher cognitive abilities might be assembled as well.