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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Up By Upwest: Is Slope Like North?, Steven M. Weisberg, Daniele Nardi, Nora S. Newcombe, Thomas F. Shipley
Up By Upwest: Is Slope Like North?, Steven M. Weisberg, Daniele Nardi, Nora S. Newcombe, Thomas F. Shipley
Faculty Research and Creative Activity
Terrain slope can be used to encode the location of a goal. However, this directional information may be encoded using a conceptual north (i.e., invariantly with respect to the environment), or in an observer-relative fashion (i.e., varying depending on the direction one faces when learning the goal). This study examines which representation is used, whether the sensory modality in which slope is encoded (visual, kinaesthetic, or both) influences representations, and whether use of slope varies for men and women. In a square room, with a sloped floor explicitly pointed out as the only useful cue, participants encoded the corner in …
Where Is Uphill? Exploring Sex Differences When Reorienting On A Sloped Environment Presented Through 2-D Images, Daniele Nardi, Roberta Miloni, Marco Orlandi, Marta Olivetti-Belardinelli
Where Is Uphill? Exploring Sex Differences When Reorienting On A Sloped Environment Presented Through 2-D Images, Daniele Nardi, Roberta Miloni, Marco Orlandi, Marta Olivetti-Belardinelli
Faculty Research and Creative Activity
One of the spatial abilities that has recently revealed a remarkable variability in performance is that of using terrain slope to reorient. Previous studies have shown a very large disadvantage for females when the slope of the floor is the only information useful for encoding a goal location. However, the source of this sex difference is still unclear. The slope of the environment provides a directional source of information that is perceived through dissociable visual and kinesthetic sensory modalities. Here we focused on the visual information, and examined whether there are sex differences in the perception of a slope presented …
Does Terrain Slope Really Dominate Goal Searching?, Daniele Nardi
Does Terrain Slope Really Dominate Goal Searching?, Daniele Nardi
Faculty Research and Creative Activity
If you can locate a target by using one reliable source of information, why would you use an unreliable one? A similar question has been faced in a recent study on homing pigeons, in which, despite the presence of better predictors of the goal location, the slope of the floor in an arena dominated the searching process. This piece of evidence seems to contradict straightforward accounts of associative learning, according to which behavior should be controlled by the stimulus that best predicts the reward, and has fueled interest toward one question that, to date, has received scarce attention in the …