Space Psychology 3926

Introduction Vitally important Virtually ubiquitous How is it represented How is it used?

Path Integration Simplest form of navigation that uses memory Cataglyphis, the Long Legged Desert Ant Twisting outgoing path, but a direct path home.

Path Integration Animal Stores direction and distance Simple vector mathematics Animal must maintain a running calculation Error will be cumulative How could it be improved?

Path Integration and Landmarks While ‘integrating’ the animal could, periodically, take a fix. Probably from the stars or the sun Clock shift experiments show this to be true! Same thing sailors used to do with a sextant (or a GPS today) But stellar position changes over time, animal cannot have stellar positions hardwired!

Beacons and Landmarks A beacon directs behaviour towards it A landmark points toward a goal, along with other cues Both are used by many animals There have been some great strides made in understanding various species’ use of landmarks in the last 20 years

Bees!! So, the bee seems to be matching the SIZE of the retinal image with the size of the image in memory Colour change has no effect Making the landmark a ‘wireframe’ has no effect Training Half size test Double Size test

Two Landmarks Bees are sort of half using angular information Training Stretch Test Bees are sort of half using angular information 3 Peak places of search in the Stretch test Collett, Cartwright, Cheng and their colleagues Rotation Test

Landmark Use in Pigeons Ken Cheng’s (1989) work Landmark Goal

Tests of Pigeon Landmark Use Search Animal searches along the same axis of landmark shift Does not COMPLETELY follow the landmark But, does not shift search in the other direction

Further tests of…. Now the shift is up down, so the animal searches in the ‘up/down’ axis Landmark Search

The Vector Sum Model Cheng concluded that the pigeons must be adding self – goal and goal to landmark vectors. This is the only model that explains the search patterns Eureka!

How do we know they are averaging vectors? Ken Cheng is like way smart Basically made two predictions Direction averaging vs vector averaging Vectors!

Environmental Shape Ken Cheng rules the universe Cheng (1986) got the ball rolling Or the cocoa puff, as the case may be… Basically, he found that rats would use geometric information to locate food in a rectangular arena Most of their errors were to rotations of the originally baited location

Cheng (1986) He then applied featural information walls corners The rats still made errors, though most of these were rotational errors He concluded that the rats were responding to the geometry of the box.

Hermer and Spelke (1994) Tried the Cheng task with toddlers and adults Disoriented the subjects Using a cue Toddlers are not unlike rats Adults are different, seem to follow the cue Same in Pike (2001)

Brodbeck, Spracklin and Pike (2003) We decided to rotate the object A rectangle on a computer monitor Subjects (or participants, or whatever..) were shown a red dot on a black rectangle The rectangle was spun about the middle Dot faded Where was the dot?

Uncued Test Results Original Dot Location 31.0% +/- 2.77 Reflection Error 18.2% +/- 3.43 17.4% +/- 2.88 Rotational Error 33.4% +/- 3.94

Cued Rectangle Results Original Dot Location 37.2% +/- 3.58 Reflection Error 11.6% +/- 3.38 10.8% +/- 2.88 Rotational Error 40.4% +/- 3.62

Uncued Square Original Dot Location 23.2% +/- 2.57 Reflection Error 24.8% +/- 3.46 23.4% +/- 2.99 Rotational Error 28.6% +/- 4.00

Cued Square Original Dot Location 34.2% +/- 2.79 Reflection Error 23.2% +/- 3.63 28.0% +/- 3.01 Rotational Error 14.6% +/- 3.77

So if it is all modular Well if it is we need integration of information right So the spatial is just, perhaps, one component of the cognitive map Different parts coming together to form a (potentially) hierarchical representation

Brodbeck, 1994 Chickadees would find a seed in a feeder Usually return later and eat it Move them around to dissociate colour and spatial location The chickadees responded last to the correctly coloured feeder Non storing Dark Eyed Juncos responded to all three cue types equally

Tests of cognitive mapping Probably the coolest experiment ever to test the idea of a maplike representation was done by Jim Gould You cannot interpret his results without resorting to mapping

Conclusions Spatial stuff is well studied Great example of modularity Many comparisons have been made, more will be made