Ma. Amorim et al., UPDATING AN OBJECTS ORIENTATION AND LOCATION DURING NONVISUAL NAVIGATION - A COMPARISON BETWEEN 2 PROCESSING MODES, Perception & psychophysics, 59(3), 1997, pp. 404-418
In the present study, we compared the effects of two processing modes
on the updating of the location and orientation of a previously viewed
object in space during a guided walk without vision. In Experiment 1,
in order to measure the error for initial perception of object's orie
ntation, 12 subjects rotated a miniature model until it matched the me
morized orientation of its counterpart object in space. In Experiment
2, they attempted either to keep track of the object continuously (in
the object-centered [OC] task) or to estimate the object's perspective
only at the terminal vantage point given the trajectory they walked (
in the trajectory-centered [TC] task). Subjects indicated the location
of the object by facing it, and then rotated the model in order to in
dicate its orientation from the new vantage point. Results showed that
, with respect to the TC mode, the OC mode induced a slowdown of the s
ubjects' self-paced locomotion velocity for both linear and angular mo
vements, and a decrease of the latencies as well as smaller absolute e
rrors for the orientation-of-the-object response. Mean signed errors o
n object's orientation were equivalent for both processing modes, sugg
esting that the latter induced different allocations of processing res
ources on a common representation of space updated by ''path integrati
on.''