The Effect of Dual Tasks in Locomotor Path Integration
Without landmarks, navigation is based on information about self-velocity, which is transformed to position or orientation by a process called path integration. Simple path integration tasks, such as reaching a previously seen goal by blindfolded locomotion, were often considered to be automatic and not influenced by unrelated cognitive activity. However, we recently showed that reproduction of self-motion without landmark cues exhibits systematic dual-task interference. Since these experiments did not exclude that the dual task only interferes with memory for self-motion, we performed two additional experiments testing generic path integration. We show that locomotor homing and reaching predefined goals by active self-motion are affected systematically by a concurrent mental task. The similarity of the effects we found to those reported for duration estimation led us to the hypothesis that subjective time may be used as a temporal basis of path integration. Alternatively, path integration and duration estimation may be based on similar underlying neuronal mechanisms, for example, coincidence detection in neural oscillators.
locomotion navigation spatial orientation time perception