On the origin of systematic errors in a simple navigation task

Abstract

One of the simplest tasks in navigation is homing: returning to the point of origin after an excursion. If no positional information is given, e.g., in the dark, path integration is used for homing by various species, including ants and humans, to estimate traveled distance from self-motion cues. In desert ants, a systematic undershoot in homing performance, which increased with outbound distance, was contributed to the inherent leakiness of the ant's path integrator [1]. Previous studies on locomotor homing in blindfolded humans [2,3] similarly showed decreasing homing gain for increasing outbound distance, but the amount of error for a particular distance varied among studies. In contrast to the prediction of leaky integration, the gain-distance relation appeared to depend on the range of distances employed with gains larger than unity for short distances and smaller for long distances.