People on the go follow the flow
By Bruce Bower
It’s easy to walk from the living room to the hallway, the hallway to the bathroom, and so on. Yet scientists have long argued about how people navigate to a destination.
A virtual reality device that allows individuals to walk through a world in which the laws of optics systematically go awry may help settle this debate, a team of cognitive scientists reports in the February Nature Neuroscience.
It’s possible that a person moving toward a target aligns it within the tunnel-like rush of visual stimuli, known as optic flow, that bombards the eyes. In contrast, observers may gauge the direction of a target relative to their own body by centering the target in their line of sight and then moving forward.