Revisiting the Relationship between Allocentric-Heading Recall and Self-Reported Sense of Direction

Revisiting the Relationship between Allocentric-Heading Recall and Self-Reported Sense of Direction Heather Burte (Burte@psych.ucsb.edu) Department of Psychology, UCSB Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA Mary Hegarty (Hegarty@psych.ucsb.edu) Department of Psychology, UCSB Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA scale was created around the idea that one’s SOD is multi- faceted. Recently, Sholl, Kenny, and DellaPorta (2006) proposed that SOD is single-faceted, and relates to the performance of a head-direction system in humans, similar to that found in animals. The head-direction system in rats was first discovered by Ranck (1984), who identified brain cells that fire when an animal’s head is facing a specific direction. The directions that these cells respond to are not directions based on the axis of the body (also called egocentric headings). They respond to the angles between the forward axis of the body and a reference direction that is grounded in the environment (i.e. the animal’s allocentric heading). An example of one allocentric reference system is the cardinal directions, but head-direction cells use the environment’s intrinsic structure, not cardinal directions. Sholl, et al.’s (2006) goal was to discover if humans have an allocentric-heading system that is functionally similar to the head-direction system of animals and to elucidate the functional architecture of this system, including its inputs, outputs, organization, representations, and computations. To accomplish that goal, they developed an allocentric-heading recall task in which students were shown a picture of a familiar landmark on their campus, and had to indicate the direction (with respect to the global environment) from which the photo was taken. They found that a person’s current facing direction influences their accuracy and decision latency in recalling allocentric headings: when a person’s facing direction matches the allocentric direction to be recalled, there is a facilitation effect; and, when the facing direction is 180o from the allocentric direction to be recalled, there is a detrimental effect. According to the author’s, one’s current body-direction signals interfere with retrieval of allocentric-headings being remembered from other locations, at which one’s body-direction signals were different. These results would be predicted if the human allocentric-heading system works similarly to the animal head-direction system. Sholl et al. also found strong correlations between performance on the heading recall task and both Kozlowski & Bryant’s (1977) single-item question (KB sense of direction; spatial orientation; spatial memory; head-direction cells; heading- recall. Introduction In everyday situations, people describe their ability to accurately navigate through cities or neighborhoods using phrases like ‘I have a great sense-of-direction’ or ‘I lack a sense-of-direction’. Kozlowski and Bryant (1977) transformed these colloquial assessments into a 7-point scale which assessed sense-of-direction (SOD). They found that these assessments were related pointing ability to familiar landmarks and updating one’s location while traveling in an underground maze. Kozlowski and Bryant used a single item scale: “How good is your sense-of- direction?” Other researchers have measured SOD in a multi-faceted way. For example, the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction scale (SBSOD) is a 15-item scale that asks people about a variety of environmental tasks, such as giving directions and estimating distances, as well as their “sense- of-direction”(Hegarty, Richardson, Montello, Lovelace, & Subbiah, 2002). Hegarty et al. found that this measure of self-assessed SOD is related to several different environmental-scale tasks, including learning the layout of a new place, blindfolded updating, and pointing to familiar landmarks. These environmental-scale tasks require locomotion and integration from multiple viewpoints to acquire and access spatial knowledge. As such, the SBSOD