Updating Local and Global Probabilities During Maze Navigation.

We examined the human ability to encode and utilize local and global uncertainty information during a navigational task. Participants were tasked with navigating a virtual maze in which wall locations were obscured. Local cues and a global direction provided guidance. The validities of the global an...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale Vol. 78; no. 3; pp. 174 - 190
Main Authors: Chen, Sixuan, Anderson, Britt
Format: Article
Published: Canadian Psychological Association Sep2024
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:We examined the human ability to encode and utilize local and global uncertainty information during a navigational task. Participants were tasked with navigating a virtual maze in which wall locations were obscured. Local cues and a global direction provided guidance. The validities of the global and local cues were separately and jointly varied across the two experiments. The results demonstrated that participants effectively utilized both global and local cues for navigation with a stronger reliance on local cues and a heightened precision in estimating their reliability. Our findings suggest that the representation of uncertainty for proximate events can be dissociated from that of distal events. Furthermore, humans effectively integrate both forms of information when making decisions during navigation tasks. This research advances our understanding of uncertainty processing and its implications for decision making in complex environments.