Tobias Meilinger

Local and global reference frames in survey knowledge acquired from navigation and maps

Abstract

It has been a long standing question in spatial navigation research whether navigators represent their environment within a single reference frame (i.e. coordinate system) or within multiple local interconnected representations. Most results suggest that route navigation is based on multiple local representations. For survey navigation most theories assume that a common reference frame for all locations within an environment is formed immediately or eventually within long-term memory. However, we have shown that survey knowledge of a recently navigated virtual environment was based on local reference frames rather than on a single global reference frame. On the contrary, pointing within one's city of residence relied on a single, north oriented reference frame. We interpret this result in a way that navigators derived survey relations from map experiences. Experiments we conduct currently examine the processes relevant for survey tasks after learning from navigation and from maps.