Sujata Gupta writes:

On a trip to Siberia in 2019, cognitive scientist Pablo Fernandez Velasco attended a raffle drawing with the region’s Evenki reindeer herders. Prizes included a soccer ball, tea, a portable radio, a GPS unit and other knickknacks. A herder in Velasco’s group won the GPS. “I thought [that] was one of the fancier prizes,” says Velasco, of the University of York in England. “He was crestfallen.”

The herder, who had been eyeing the radio, had no use for a GPS. He, like other Evenki herders, navigate the vast taiga by heeding their own gait and tracking place names, paths and river flow patterns, a suite of strategies Velasco and geographer Anna Gleizer of the University of Oxford described earlier this year.

But such real-life navigation remains understudied. Instead, researchers have long devoted their time and attention to studying how participants, mostly from the West, “navigate” on a flat computer screen. Such studies scrub out the noisy environment, including tree canopies, wildlife, weather events and other occurrences, to ensure maximum control.

In treating the environment as fixed — as is common across brain and behavior research —scientists operate under the assumption that humans behave the same way regardless of their cultural or environmental milieu, neuroscientist Hugo Spiers of University College London and colleagues write in a forthcoming Royal Society Open Science. Yet, decades of research suggests that findings in a lab may not translate to real life.

“You can do work in a lab in the United States and have everything go flawlessly and then take it out to the field and everything falls apart,” says environmental anthropologist Helen Davis of Arizona State University in Tempe.

Spiers and collaborators argue that researchers should stop using reductionist approaches that eliminate environmental “noise.” Adding the outside world to research is more complex. But newer tools mean researchers can bring that wider world to the lab, or vice versa, while still ensuring a high level of control.

Navigation research is moving from the two-dimensional world on a computer screen to a more realistic three-dimensional world, says Gabriella Vigliocco, a cognitive scientist also at UCL and coauthor of the Royal Society paper. The work isn’t just helping researchers better understand how people navigate their environment. The findings have implications for what we know about human development, public health and the human psyche. [Continue reading…]