WASTING MONEY > GPS Boochee

GPS Vs mental mapping

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DRxBMW:


It's a question that probably every driver with the latest & greatest whiz bang navigation device on his or her dashboard has asked at least once: What did we ever do before GPS? How did people find their way around, especially in places they’d never been before?

Like most questions asked in our tech-dependent era, these underestimate the power of the human mind. It is surprisingly good at developing “mental maps” of an area, a skill new research shows can grow stronger with use. The question is, with disuse — say, by relying on a GPS device — can we lose the skill, too?

The notion of a mental map isn’t new. In the 1940s, the psychologist Edward C. Tolman used rats in mazes to demonstrate that “learning consists not in stimulus-response connections but in the building up in the nervous system of sets which function like cognitive maps.”

This concept is widely accepted today. When exploring a new territory, we perceive landmarks along a route. By remembering their position and the spatial relations between the streets, locations and landmarks we pass, we are able to develop survey knowledge (stored in the mind like a mental map), which enables us to indicate directions, and to find shortcuts or detours — in short, to react and navigate comfortably.

It’s not all in our heads, though: physical maps help us build cognitive maps. By depicting the spatial relations in a big context, they provide a useful reference to integrate navigational experience.

In one experiment, I had 26 residents of Tübingen, Germany, navigate a three-dimensional model of their hometown by wearing head-mounted displays. My team and I asked them to point to well-known locations around town not visible from their current perceived position.

Varying their viewing direction — facing north, facing east — we then assessed their pointing error. All participants performed best when facing one particular direction, north, and the pointing error increased with increasing deviation from north. In other words, by using knowledge gained from navigation to link their perceived position to the corresponding position on a city map, participants could easily retrieve the locations from their memory of city maps — which, after all, are typically oriented north.

If maps help us, what is the problem with GPS? A lot: in my opinion, it is likely that the more we rely on technology to find our way, the less we build up our cognitive maps. Unlike a city map, a GPS device normally provides bare-bones route information, without the spatial context of the whole area. We see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way. Developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.

Our brains act economically: they try to decrease the amount of information to be stored (e.g., by relating new thoughts to already known content) and avoid storing unnecessary information. That may be the unconscious appeal of a GPS, but it means we’re not pushing our brains to work harder.

And a GPS device may even contradict your mental map by telling you to go left (e.g., for a faster highway) while your target is actually to the right. All of this leads us to use our mental maps even less.

But shouldn’t we just accept that GPS is a good substitute for old-fashioned maps? No. Navigational devices can be time-savers, but they can easily become crutches. Break your GPS, and you may find yourself lost.

And there is more: The psychologist Eleanor A. Maguire and her colleagues at University College London found that spatial experience actually changes brain structures. As taxi drivers learned the spatial layout of London, the gray matter in their hippocampal areas — that is, the areas of the brain integrating spatial memories — increased. But if the taxi drivers’ internal GPS grew stronger with use, it stands to reason that the process is reversible after disuse. You may degrade your spatial abilities when not training them, as with someone who learned a musical instrument and stopped playing.

Navigating, keeping track of one’s position and building up a mental map by experience is a very challenging process for our brains, involving memory (remembering landmarks, for instance) as well as complex cognitive processes (like calculating distances, rotating angles, approximating spatial relations). Stop doing these things, and it’ll be harder to pick them back up later.

How to avoid losing our mental maps? The answer, as always, is practice.

Next time you’re in a new place, forget the GPS device. Study a map to get your bearings, then try to focus on your memory of it to find your way around. City maps do not tell you each step, but they provide a wealth of abstract survey knowledge. Fill in these memories with your own navigational experience, and give your brain the chance to live up to its abilities.

Julia Frankenstein is a psychologist at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg.

wmax351:
I dislike using GPS's. I get lost when I use them. I look at a map, and memorize it in seconds. There is a definite logic to roads and navigation, and you can find your way by driving and looking for landmarks, if lost.

I do like my Droid for the google maps. I can pull up a detailed map of anywhere, with locations of anything. I look at the map, see where something is, and then go.

A family friend who usually uses a gps, printed out the Directions from google maps, but not the map itself. You make one wrong turn, and you are screwed.

Uffda:
Reading various posts about GPS, I never understood why it has to be looked at as an either/or proposition. "Use GPS entirely or use maps entirely."  I think it's great to have the moving map available IF I want to look at it.  But I would never want to head out without reviewing a map, as well as taking the right set of maps along for the ride.  The basic point is a GPS is just another tool and should be used as that.  Not as the bible. Not as the tour director.  Of course, my perspective is also grounded from my years as a C130 Navigator (started out in 1973), going across the Pacific with a chart, celestial, and dead reckoning when nothing else was available.  So, yeah, I fully appreciate following the basics of navigation.  But I am also taking advantage of the technology when it is available in the right package.
On a practical note, I found the GPS VERY handy this summer on my trip across Canada, northern Michigan/Wisconsin and out to North Dakota.  I was trying to make good time with minimal fuel stops.  When I started to get low on fuel, the POI database with gas stations allowed me to accurately decide whether I could go another 25 - 40 miles and still find a gas station.  If you are in an unfamiliar, sparsely populated area - familiarity with the map is good and having a GPS along is only better.  Heck, for all of $140, just having one in your bag and turning it on when you need it, off when you don't, accomplishes the same thing as a Droid or iPhone and doesn't require a cell phone tower to connect to the internet for maps. :popcorm

frankenduck:
A GPS is invaluable for finding an address in a big city. (or even some small ones)  It's also handy for buying stuff on Craig's List that are in some out of the way place.

For riding, I have mine running a background program that keeps infinite tracks so I can download it and know exactly where I've been.

It's also handy as a digital speedometer.

I like maps too. For planning or figure out your route as you go.

One nice thing is that you can go to the tourism site for just about every state (except CA) and they'll mail you a current highway map.

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