Navigating in Three Dimensions

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.

If at first you don’t succeed, you fail.

I’m a couple of months behind on the phenomenon that is Portal, a short video game produced by Valve Studios. Portal is a first-person puzzle game with an ingenious twist: you have a “gun” that can shoot an entrance and exit portal pretty much anywhere, so you can cross a chasm by shooting portals next to you and on the wall across from you, allowing you to “cross” the chasm by avoiding it all together. The game is surprisingly hard to explain, actually. I’ll just embed a video:

The game is amazingly well done, and it makes me think about the video game and cognition research that is all the rage right now. Multitudes of studies (most famously Green & Bavelier, 2003) have shown that video game experts can process more information and have a larger functional field of view. This is just a side effect of these action video games, though - they weren’t designed to enhance cognition. A game like Portal, however, stretches the mind and requires an entirely new way to solve problems. Portal requires the player to completely re-conceptualize their concept of 3D space. Not many other tasks do that.This game provides a fascinating platform for learning this entirely new concept in a first-person environment. There are times (when learning how to maneuver a submarine, for example) when this type of spatial nonconformity is necessary to successfully complete a task. It would be interesting to examine what new cognitive skills develop as one becomes an expert with a game like this. The field of video game and cognition research is still fairly new, but I anticipate seeing it expand in many new directions, including leveraging innovative new games such as this to examine how we can train our minds and expand the way we think.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love my GPS

So I’m spatially challenged. I can follow maps, but I have no ability to create my own mental map of an area. However, my inability to form anything above route-based knowledge is for another post. What is worth mentioning is that I finally offloaded the cognitive challenge of navigating to a new GPS device, the TomTom Go 720. Most everyone knows how GPS devices work. You enter in an address or Point of Interest, and it calculates the best way to get you there, giving you turn-by-turn real time instructions. It’s really great.

There was a rocky start, though, and there was a learning period where I had to learn to trust the device. The voice commands are fairly demanding: “Turn right at So-And-So Drive.” The map shows you exactly where to turn, and it gives so much useful information. But there’s a strange loss of control that comes with trusting the device, even though you are, of course, fully in control of the car. The task of deciding where to turn next had been replaced by the task of deciding whether or not to trust the system. Whether the device really knew where it was taking me, or whether I should trust what I know and take a potentially longer route.

Learning to trust the system is directly tied to the body of literature that researchers automation. You should be reliant on it; it’s there to help, and you did buy it. GPS systems are assistive devices in their current state: they give you advice, and you can choose whether or not to follow it. It makes the task of navigation easier, but it adds a whole new layer of decision making: do you follow the advice to turn there, or do you follow your gut? And if you are worried about the trustworthiness of the system, is it really helping? Are things better because you’ve offloaded a difficult task to a computer?

After a while, I got used to it - most people do. The answer, at least with me, was training. After a few instances of navigating to a new location or avoiding a roadblock or getting around traffic, I trusted the GPS to save my butt and get me to where I was going. I was trained to trust the system, and my interactions with the system trained it to be more useful to me. I changed the settings of the device to adapt to my learning style and it learned some of my Favorite Locations and a little more about my driving preferences. I learned to feel more comfortable with it. This piece of automation goes with me almost all the time, and after a rocky start, I learned to rely on it.

Of course, over-reliance can be a bad thing:

(By the way, this really did happen in real life: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article707216.ece)