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Wednesday, October 20, 2021
This Monday, journal Nature published a multidisciplinary research paper from five universities, showing for the first time that pedestrians tend to choose a route that points to the destination as much as possible in each section. Previously observed in animals, the vector-based navigation has resulted in sometimes consistently longer routes than the shortest available option, as well as choice of different routes from A to B and from B to A due to the differences in where how vector is pointing, the authors wrote.
The authors had processed 55,000 anonymised GPS paths from 14,000 people in the Boston and Cambridge areas over the duration of one year to find “A to B” and “B to A” pairs to analyse. The research team comprised staff from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Paris-Saclay University, France, The University of Hong Kong, Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy, New York University, USA, and Istituto di Informatica e Telematica del CNR, Italy.
One of the authors, Professor Carlo Ratti from MIT Senseable City Lab, a research group that explores how new technologies are changing the way we understand, design and ultimately live in cities, commented that the findings could be useful as a part of ongoing research to understand better how the human brain works and to utilize the obtained knowledge in the design of artificial intelligence systems.
One of the paper authors, Professor Joshua Brett Tenenbaum, commented that the vector based navigation does not require access to a detailed map of the area. Modern navigation computers are able to evaluate shortest route without paying attention to the angular displacement, he remarked, “You can’t have a detailed, distance-based map downloaded into the brain, so how else are you going to do it? The more natural thing might be use information that’s more available to us from our experience. Thinking in terms of points of reference, landmarks, and angles is a very natural way to build algorithms for mapping and navigating space based on what you learn from your own experience moving around in the world.”
Prior research by Hugo Spiers, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, published in 2014 and in 2017 in journal Current Biology, had previously demonstrated vector based navigation in animals via the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex.