Péruch P, May M, Wartenberg F
Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences Cognitives, CNRS, Marseille, France.
Perception. 1997;26(3):301-11. doi: 10.1068/p260301.
Triangle completion (ie homing to the starting point after completing two legs of a triangle) is a widely used method for examining path-integration abilities in animals and humans. Two experiments are reported in which homing was used to examine the efficiency of purely visual mechanisms (eg optical flow) for spatial-information coding and integration. Adult observers had to complete triangles in an interactively simulated three-dimensional environment which consisted of two critical objects and a homogeneous set of white cylinders serving as background. Each participant completed twenty-seven triangles corresponding to a factorial combination of three geometrical fields of view (40 degrees, 60 degrees, or 80 degrees) and nine triangle layouts (with variations of the first turning angle and the second leg). Homing performances revealed strong effects of triangle layout, but no effect of geometrical fields of view: variations in the amount of simultaneous visible spatial information did not influence the acquisition of spatial knowledge in the environments used. Applying the encoding-error model to the data revealed severe systematic errors of picking up directional information while moving through visually simulated environments. These results are discussed with respect to informational differences between situations of purely visual and nonvisual navigations in space.
三角形完成任务（即在完成三角形的两条边后回到起点）是一种广泛用于检测动物和人类路径整合能力的方法。本文报告了两项实验，其中利用归巢来检测用于空间信息编码和整合的纯视觉机制（如光流）的效率。成年观察者必须在一个交互式模拟的三维环境中完成三角形任务，该环境由两个关键物体和一组作为背景的白色圆柱体组成。每个参与者完成二十七个三角形任务，这些任务对应于三种几何视野（40度、60度或80度）和九种三角形布局（第一个转弯角度和第二条边有所变化）的因子组合。归巢表现显示出三角形布局的强烈影响，但几何视野没有影响：同时可见的空间信息量的变化并未影响在所使用的环境中空间知识的获取。将编码误差模型应用于数据，结果显示在视觉模拟环境中移动时获取方向信息存在严重的系统误差。本文针对纯视觉和非视觉空间导航情况之间的信息差异对这些结果进行了讨论。
