© Universität Bielefeld
Mechanisms of multi-guidance in human navigation
The return to a known location, often over long distances and through complex environments, can be vital for many animals, including humans. Two main sources of information can help guide the journey to a previously visited place: (1) Landmark guidance: features in the environment can serve as potential landmarks; (2) Path integration: by integrating the distances and directions travelled during a journey, one can estimate the direct way home.
How do we combine path integration with the guidance based on visual landmarks? And, if combination occurs, how do we determine the weighting for the different guidance systems? In this project, we investigate the integration of landmark guidance and path integration in environments of different complexity.
We are developing a flexible software suite, utilising the Unity3D game engine, to present virtual reality navigation tasks both at home on participant’s desktop PCs and on campus, in a highly immersive virtual reality setup.
Using this approach, we analyse, whether and how the use and combination of different guidance systems depends on the structure of the environment, as well as how these combinations change adaptively and systematically over the course of an individual navigation task.