Reginald G. Golledge

Nonvisual Navigation by Blind and Sighted: Assessment of Path Integration Ability

Blindfolded sighted, adventitiously blind, and congenitally blind subjects performed a set of navigation tasks. The more complex tasks involved spatial inference and included retracing a multisegment route in reverse, returning directly to an origin after being led over linear segments, and pointing to targets after locomotion. As a group, subjects responded systematically to route manipulations in the complex tasks, but performance was poor. Patterns of error and response latency are informative about the internal representation used; in particular, they do not support the hypothesis that only a representation of the origin of locomotion is maintained. The slight performance differences between groups varying in visual experience were neither large nor consistent across tasks. Results provide little indication that spatial competence strongly depends on prior visual experience.

Spatial Updating of Self-Position and Orientation During Real, Imagined, and Virtual Locomotion

Two studies investigated updating of self-position and heading during real, imagined, and simulated locomotion. Subjects were exposed to a two-segment path with a turn between segments; they responded by turning to face the origin as they would if they had walked the path and were at the end of the second segment. The conditions of pathway exposure included physical walking, imagined walking from a verbal description, watching another person walk, and experiencing optic flow that simulated walking, with or without a physical turn between the path segments. If subjects failed to update an internal representation of heading, but did encode the pathway trajectory, they should have overturned by the magnitude of the turn between the path segments. Such systematic overturning was found in the description and watching conditions, but not with physical walking. Simulated optic flow was not by itself sufficient to induce spatial updating that supported correct turn responses.

Navigation System for the Blind: Auditory Display Modes and Guidance

The research we are reporting here is part of our effort to develop a navigation system for the blind. Our long-term goal is to create a portable, self-contained system that will allow visually impaired individuals to travel through familiar and unfamiliar environments without the assistance of guides. The system, as it exists now, consists of the following functional components: (1) a module for determining the travelers position and orientation in space, (2) a Geographic Information System comprising a detailed database of our test site and software for route planning and for obtaining information from the database, and (3) the user interface. The experiment reported here is concerned with one function of the navigation system: guiding the traveler along a predefined route. We evaluate guidance performance as a function of four different display modes: one involving spatialized sound from a virtual acoustic display, and three involving verbal commands issued by a synthetic speech display. The virtual display mode fared best in terms of both guidance performance and user preferences.

Exploring the anchor-point hypothesis of spatial cognition*

Abstract The anchor-point hypothesis of spatial cognition, according to which primary nodes or reference points anchor distinct regions in cognitive space, brings together certain frequently reported apparent properties of mental maps: the regionalization and hierarchical organization of cognitive space, and the active role of salient cues in structuring spatial cognition. After a brief overview of the state of the art in cognitive mapping research, the anchor-point hypothesis is first explored conceptually, and then one particular version of it, the ‘tectonic plates’ hypothesis, is made operational. For that second part of the study, cognitive configurations derived from five subjects selected from a larger sample taken in Goleta, California are analyzed using three different methods, and features transcending any method-specific biases are identified. Although not entirely unambiguous, these first results seem encouraging and warrant further research in this direction.

Sex‐Related Differences and Similarities in Geographic and Environmental Spatial Abilities

On average, males have reliably been found to outperform females on several traditional psychometric tests of spatial ability, especially those involving a component of mental rotation. The evidence is much less clear and complete with respect to performance on larger-scale and more ecologically valid tasks generally associated with geographic investigation, such as those involved in wayfinding, map use, and place learning. In this study, a community sample of 43 females and 36 males performed a large battery of spatial and geographic tasks. The battery included psychometric tests; tests of directly acquired spatial knowledge from a campus walk; map-learning tests; tests of extant geographic knowledge at local, regional, national, and international scales; tests of object-location memory; a verbal spatial task; and various self-report measures of spatial competence and style. Both univariate means tests and multivariate discriminant analyses largely agree on a comprehensive picture of the spatial abilitie...

Geography and the disabled: a survey with special reference to vision impaired and blind populations

Traditionally, geography has paid relatively little attention to disabled or disadvantaged populations. As society has concerned itself more with problems of dealing with the blind, the physically handicapped, the retarded, the deaf, the socioeconomically destitute and homeless, and other special populations, the discipline of geography has dragged its feet in terms of examining how its expertise can be used to help understand and solve the many problems these special populations encounter in normal commerce with physical and built environments. In this paper I outline some general and some specific suggestions regarding the way geographers can invoke their skills and knowledge to deal with sets of problems faced by these special populations. The paper is designed to make suggestions both for instructional purposes (i.e., providing a sufficiently wide topical coverage for potential course-work in the area), and to identify specific future research challenges. The combined effect is to suggest that geographical study of the disabled could represent a new systematic area of geographic concentration that would combine micro and macro approaches, and facilitate the development of new geographic theory, methods, and applications.

The Nature of Geographic Knowledge

The nature of geographic knowledge today is very different from what it was fifty years ago. It has evolved from phenomenal (declarative) to intellectual (primed by cognitive demands). Surges of interest in systematic specialties and technical innovations in representation and analysis have changed the nature of geographic knowledge, advanced geographic vocabulary, defined and examined geographic concepts, and developed spatially explicit theories relating to human and physical environments. Explorations of interactions between these domains has generated a new interest in integrated science. This interest has produced a unique way of examining human-environment relations, and has provided the basis for a vastly different underlying knowledge structure in the discipline. But the future still challenges and significant problems face geography if it is to remain a viable academic discipline in the new information technology society.

Acquisition of Route and Survey Knowledge in the Absence of Vision

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.

Path selection and route preference in human navigation: A progress report

Two critical characteristics of human wayfinding are destination choice and path selection. Traditionally, the path selection problem has been ignored or assumed to be the result of minimizing procedures such as selecting the shortest path, the quickest path or the least costly path. In this paper I draw on existing literature from cognitive mapping and cognitive distance, to define possible route selection criteria other than these traditional ones. Experiments with route selection on maps and in the field are then described and analyzed to determine which criteria appear to be used as the environment changes and as one increases the number of nodes along a path (i.e., as trip chaining replaces a simple Origin-Destination (O-D) pairing.

A conceptual model and empirical analysis of children's acquisition of spatial knowledge

Abstract How adults and children come to understand, represent and behave within their spatial environment are topics of great interest to geographers, psychologists, environmental planners and laypeople. Considerable research and theory has been published on these and related topics. In this paper, we will review some of what is known and theorized about spatial cognition and then consider elements of our research program on the acquisition of spatial knowledge. We focus on two intimately related topics. The first is the development of a conceptual model of the knowledge structures and processes associated with acquiring, representing and accessing knowledge of a given environment. The conceptual model forms the basis for a formal computational process model intended as a simulation of actual knowledge and performance in way finding tasks. The second emphasis is an in-depth case study of the acquisition of spatial knowledge. The case study focuses on a single child acquiring knowledge of a lengthy route through an unfamiliar suburban neighborhood. It is presented as an empirical test of certain assumptions embodied within the conceptual model. Before introducing the conceptual model and the case study, we first review the state of current theory and data on spatial cognition and identify four central issues confronting researchers in this field. This review provides a necessary context for describing and evaluating our program of research. The second section of this paper discusses elements of the conceptual model and its relationship to other formal computational models. The third section considers specific hypotheses about the acquisition and representation of spatial knowledge and tests of these hypotheses from the single in-depth case study. The final discussion section of this paper is a reconsideration of the four issues raised in the first section and necessary and proposed extensions of the current research.