Human spatial navigation: benchmark behavioral findings

Abstract

In human spatial navigation, people determine their locations and orientations and the locations of goals in the environment. This chapter reviewed the important behavioral findings shedding light on how human adults accomplish these navigational tasks by relying on two processes, based on their self-motion cues (path integration) or visual landmarks (piloting). The findings suggest that human navigation can rely on either process alone when either self-motion cues or landmarks are available. With both self-motion and landmarks cues being available, people may average the estimates from individual processes that do not appear discrepant by assigning more weights to the more precise estimate or rely only on the landmarks when the estimates appear discrepant. In a complex environment with multiple spaces separated by boundaries (e.g., walls), piloting might only occur in the local spaces whereas path integration might be the primary method to assist the across-boundary navigation. The empirical findings indicate that although people can rely on path integration to develop global representations of spatial relations across boundaries and update their positions in the global representations, developing and updating global representations are challenging especially when the local spaces are globally (e.g., in terms of cardinal directions) misaligned and visually similar. Therefore, human spatial navigation in complex environments is the outcome of the interaction between the processes of path integration and piloting.