Cognitive Components of Path Integration: Implications for Simulator Studies of Human Navigation

Abstract Efficient daily navigation is underpinned by path integration, the mechanism by which we use self-movement information to update our location in space. Although this process is well understood at a motor level, it is unclear whether there is a cognitive component to the behavior. I will present data from a triangle-completion paradigm. During the task, participants were required to perform a concurrent verbal task—we were interested in whether the nature of the task affected their path integration accuracy (for both distance and heading calculations).