A few years ago,
each of my adolescent kids was invited with his classmates to a
"navigation day", organized by the youth movement and the parent
association. We live in a small
community with an infrequent bus schedule.
The rational for this navigation day:
"We drive our kids everywhere, thus they don't develop independence
and don't know how to get from place to place on their own and using public
transportation. The purpose of this day
is to train these skills."
A few days ago I
happened to read this short piece by JULIE LYTHCOTT HAIMS, a former dean of
Stanford University. Haims mentions
eight must- have skills for every 18 year old.
One of the skills is this: "An 18-year-old must be able to
find his or her way around a campus, the town in which her summer
internship is located, or the city where he is working or studying abroad. We drive or accompany our children
everywhere, even when a bus, their bicycle, or their own feet could get them
there; thus, kids don’t know the route for getting from here to there, how to
cope with transportation options and snafus, when and how to fill the car with
gas, or how to make and execute transportation plans."
I get the feeling
that this is typical of adolescents and young people from good SES background
in Western societies… Lack of navigational
experience not only affects a person's independence and ability to get from
here to there, but also his
ability to create a cognitive map of his near and far surrounding. Cognitive maps form through active interaction with the environment. When an adolescent sits at the back sit of
the car, looks passively out of the window or, worse, looks at his cellular,
the cognitive map created in his mind is far poorer than when he navigates
actively. The problem is not only with
adolescents who don't have a driving licence. When a driver
uses GPS, especially if he does it "blindly", his ability to create a
cognitive map of his surrounding is badly affected. In both cases, the adolescent's and the
driver's, the mental representation created is mainly of two "dots" –
the starting point and the destination point.
The space between these points is not mentally represented or is
represented poorly.
Maguire et al found a correlation between the hippocampus
volume of London taxi drivers and their experience on the job. The more experience a person had
as a taxi driver, the larger was his hippocampus. This was in contrast with London bus drivers,
who had no correlation between hippocampus size and experience at the job. While taxi drivers have to navigate to
different and new destinations all the time, bus drivers drive on the same
known and practiced route. These studies
were done in 2000 and 2006, before GPS use was widespread.
Several researchers have argued that navigating
with GPS devices supports only a reduced, disembodied understanding of
landscape, hinders the development of cognitive maps, and results in poor
reconstruction and memory of the environment through which one is driving. The GPS relieves the driver of the need to plan
his route (or to retrieve a route from memory), to pay careful attention to his
surrounding in order to look for landmarks that match the planned route
(salient objects, road signs etc.), to monitor his present location compared
with the target location and his progress towards the target location, to
correct navigation mistakes and to store the route in memory for future
use. Using GPS reduces the driver's active
involvement with the surrounding environment. Thanks to GPS, “engaging with the
environment becomes a matter of choice”.
On a philosophical note, Yi-Fu Tuan, a cultural geographer,
defines space and place in relation to each other: What begins as undifferentiated
space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value. […]
From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom,
and threat of space, and vice versa. "
Does GPS hinder our ability to turn our
route from "space" to "place"?
Obviously, for people with significant
navigation difficulties and with a poor sense of direction, the GPS is a
lifesaver. It also enables us to
discover facts about our route's surrounding that we would not have discovered
otherwise (for instance, the location of restaurants along the route).
The ability to
maintain a sense of direction and of place as we move in our surrounding is a
basic cognitive ability. Navigating in
space enables us to find our way in complex surroundings (a trail in nature,
but also an airport, a campus, a shopping mall, an elementary school, high
school). We can think about the
experience of a first grade child, who moves from the small surrounding of the
kindergarten to a much larger and much more complex surrounding of the
elementary school (at least in Israel).
Do we think enough about this aspect of school readiness? How important
is it to let the child know and find his way in the space in which he is going
to study – before the beginning of the school year?
When lesions to the
brain impair navigational abilities, patients often experience devastating
effects on their everyday lives. Given its complexity, it is not surprising that
humans differ widely in
their navigational abilities. Variability in navigational abilities can arise
at multiple stages of the process, including the precision with which spatial
information is encoded from sensory experiences, the ability to form spatial
representations of external environments and the efficacy with which they are
used to guide navigational behavior. There are individual differences in
perspective taking ability (the ability to perceive depth and
distance). There are individual
differences in size perception and estimation (these are related to
mathematical ability). There are
individual differences in the sense of direction (a person's ability to monitor
the spatial direction his head is pointing to).
We can estimate a child's sense of direction when we ask him, when he is
in the psychologist's room, to point at the direction of his class, his home
etc.
A child's
ability to navigate is affected both by genetic factors and by environmental
factors like parental guidance and exposure to maps. Thus it can be improved. The more active a person's interaction with
his environment is, the deeper his visuospatial processing will be.
You may
have noticed that when you drive around in your car, even in a highly scenic
environment, and stop in viewpoints, you don't enjoy yourself as much as when
you hike in the same surrounding. There's no doubt that physical effort adds to
the enjoyment, there's no doubt that finishing a trail gives one a sense of
closure and accomplishment, but it may be that walking enables us to create a
more detailed cognitive map of the surrounding, which gives us a good feeling
of "mastery".
When we reach
specific sites abroad, sometimes one of my children announces: "I've been here in/with google
earth". What's the difference
between visiting a place physically and visiting it virtually? Beyond the multisensory experience of the
real thing, when we are actually there we experience the site in its physical
context, we understand better how it "connects" with the surrounding
city or other sites in the area.
Is it a new – old
role of the school at our age? To take
children on navigation trips? To teach
them to find their way around? Is it
easier to read a map, to study Geography, when you navigate with a map? When you create your own map of your physical
environment?
Many studies of
individual differences in spatial ability have focused on smaller-scale tasks
that involve simple object transformations (i.e. mental rotation). Do these abilities predict individual
differences at large scale navigation? A recent review of 12 studies found that
the median correlation between the two kinds of tasks exceeded 0.3 only in two
studies, and the majority of correlations were not statistically significant. Navigation in the real world also involves
the sensing of self-motion for the purpose of spatial updating and path
integration, an ability that cannot be measured with simple object-based tasks
in which self-motion cues are neither
available nor task-relevant.
Leshed,
G., Velden, T., Rieger, O., Kot, B., & Sengers, P. (2008, April). In-car
gps navigation: engagement
with and disengagement from the environment. In Proceedings
of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp.
1675-1684). ACM. http://leshed.comm.cornell.edu/pubs/chi1103-leshed.pdf
Wolbers,
T., & Hegarty, M. (2010). What determines our navigational abilities? Trends in
cognitive sciences, 14(3), 138-146.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.297.8605&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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