NaviGadget

how your internal GPS works

Jan 12, 2009 gps navigation

In the last issue of Psychological Science there’s an article about how your brain reads cues from its surroundings, similar to a GPS receiver needing signals from outer space.

The brain employs a number of tricks to reorient us, keeping our confusion to a minimum and quickly pointing us in the right direction.

Research has suggested that animals and young children mainly rely on geometric cues (e.g. lengths, distances, angles) to help them get reoriented.

Human adults, however, can also make use of feature cues (e.g. color, texture, landmarks) in their surrounding area. But which method do we use more often? Psychologists Kristin R. Ratliff from the University of Chicago and Nora S. Newcombe from Temple University conducted a set of experiments investigating if human adults have a preference for using geometric or feature cues to become reoriented.

Follow this link for the rest of the article….

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