title: Acquisition of route and survey knowledge in the absence of vision.
abstract: The ability of sighted, blindfolded individuals to navigate while walking was assessed in two types of tasks, one requiring knowledge of a route that previously had been navigated and another requiring more complex spatial inference or computation. A computerized measurement system monitored spatial position. The route tasks included maintenance of a heading, distance and turn reproduction and estimation, and turn production. The inferential task required completion of a multisegment pathway by returning directly to the origin. pathways were replicated at two different scales. Measures for the route-knowledge tasks indicated a substantial ability to navigate in the absence of visual cues. Route reproduction performance was particularly accurate despite intrinsic veering tendencies. A substantial increase in error was observed in the pattern-completion task. Errors in pathway completion increased with pathway complexity and were quite similar in the two scales. Correlational data suggested that performance on different route-knowledge tasks reflected differing underlying representations. The completion task led to a high correlation between absolute turn and distance error but had minimal correlations with the route tasks. The data suggest that a survey representation with some degree of scale independence was constructed for use in the pathway completion task.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Klatzky
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Loomis
authors.forename: R G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Golledge
authors.forename: J G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Cicinelli
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Doherty
authors.forename: J W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Pellegrino