Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 44

Fig. 3.2 In order to interpret the picture visual-spatial abilities use perspective and experience

Fig. 3.3 One of Shepard and
Metzler's mental rotation
tasks: are the two objects
identical?

work when people take (or change) perspectives. Tversky and Hard, for example,
have shown that people switch with ease between egocentric and another person's
perspectives in their verbal descriptions [ 222 ] .

3.1.1.4 Path Integration

People are able to locate themselves during locomotion automatically and continu-
ously, even without landmarks as external references [ 50 ] . For example, this ability
enables people to always point in the direction to the location they started from,
independent from the route taken. Pointing gestures and tracking of path completion
have been applied in studying human path integration capacity [ 125 , 126 ] . Path
integration is an ability essential for survival, not only for humans. Desert mice,
for example, have a capability for homing [ 145 ] . Desert ants travel some tortuous
routes outbound from home foraging for food, but then return home along straight
routes [ 152 , 234 ] , proving to be able for path integration. Honeybees communicate
directions and distances of food sources, information also gained from path
integration [ 58 ] . For people, it guarantees finding home again even in the dark, or
with a visual impairment. Since path integration works without external reference