Recently, the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program had a guest speaker, Dr. Charles Oman from MIT. He spoke on spatial cognition in astronauts, because zero gravity is an entirely unique environment for navigation. There is no natural down – when you can orient yourself in any direction, it becomes much more difficult to anchor your perception of space to a single point. This makes for navigation and even basic perception a difficult task.
Here’s an example: you are an astronaut on the space shuttle and you fall asleep for your six hours in your sleeping bunk with the Earth below you when you look out the window and shut the blinds (there really are blinds). You wake up, not knowing the shuttle has rotated 180 degrees to do something. When you pull open the blinds, you expect Earth to be below, but instead, because the shuttle has rotated, it is above you. Your spatial sense is instantly destroyed, your feet and head are in the wrong place and – apparently – you vomit instantly. What you expect is not what you perceive or feel, and this leads to a massive body-environment disconnect.
While my line of work with the Navy should hopefully never lead to instant vomiting, this did get me thinking about navigation in a 3-D space. Normally, humans are flatlanders. However, in planes and on submarines (of direct interest to me), you have to think three-dimensionally, which we’re not so good at. How do submarine navigators learn to navigate in 3-D space? Does this improve their spatial skills? How good would they be at Tetris?
I am excited to begin learning about submariners, their training in navigation, and how systems need to be designed to take this extra dimension into account. I’ll have an expert group of participants for my experiments, which leads to all kinds of excellent ideas.
