Maps {bpnreg}

The geometry of human knowledge of navigation space.

Description

A dataset from a study by Warren et.al. (2017) on the geometry of human knowledge of navigation space.

Usage

Maps

Format

A data frame with 160 rows and 8 variables:

Subject

a numeric variable indicating the participant number

Trial.no

a numeric variable indicating the trial number of the target a participant had to locate (1-8)

Maze

a between subjects factor variable indicating the type of maze a participant was in (0 = Euclidean, 1 = non-Euclidean)

Trial.type

a within subjects factor indicating the type of target (0 = standard, 1 = probe)

Error

a numeric variable containing the angular error in degrees

Learn

a numeric variable indicating the number of trials a participant completed in the training phase

L.c

mean centered Learning

Error.rad

a numeric variable containing the angular error in radians

Details

In their study Warren et.al. (2017) conduct an experiment in which a total of 20 participants used virtual reality headsets to navigate through one of two versions of a virtual maze. One version of the maze is the standard or Euclidean maze. The other version of the maze, the non-Euclidean maze, has exactly the same layout as the standard maze apart from that it contains wormholes by which participants can be 'teleported' from one place in the maze to another.

In a training phase participants had learned to navigate between different pairs of start and target objects in one of two versions of the maze. The number of trials each participants completed in this training phase was recorded.

In the test phase of the experiment participants first walked to a start object. When they had reached this object the maze disappeared and only a "textured groundplane" of the maze remained visible. The participants then turned toward the location of the target object that they had remembered during the training phase and started to walk toward the target. The angular difference, angular error, between the initial walking direction of a participant from the start object and the location of the target object was recorded as an outcome variable in the experiment.The angular error is a circular variable and can be described and analyzed using circular statistics.

Apart from the between-subjects factor, the type of maze, the experiment also included a within-subjects factor, trial number. All participants had to complete 8 trials in the test phase of the experiment. In each of these trials they had to walk to a specific target object. An additional within-subjects factor is the type of target object. Pairs of start and target objects were of two types: probe and standard. The probe objects were located near the entrance and exit of a wormhole whereas the standard objects were located at some distance from the wormholes. For each of these two types of objects participants had to find 4 different targets resulting in a total of 8 trials per participant.

Source

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.020