Spatial cognition
Do people stick to one way of giving directions across tasks?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Frisbee players showed no consistent personal preference for 'left/right' versus 'home/away' style directions across a navigation task and a sports task; the task, not the person, shaped which was easier.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Online within-subject reaction-time task (order counterbalanced): road-intersection and ultimate-frisbee versions, each crossing prompt type (absolute vs relative) with stick-figure position (near vs far); pre-registered cross-task correlation.
- N
- N=58 · 76 ultimate frisbee players responded; 58 verified participants with complete data were analysed.
- Population
- Ultimate frisbee players from the Philadelphia area, mean age about 27, mostly experienced players.
- Outcome
- Reaction-time difference between relative and absolute prompts in each task (reference frame preference) and its cross-task correlation; accuracy.
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Key findings
There was no correlation between individuals' reference frame preferences in the two tasks, and a Bayes factor of 5.87 favoured the null. Preferences also did not relate to self-rated sense of direction or years of play. Instead, the tasks differed systematically: players were faster with relative prompts in the frisbee task but slightly faster with absolute prompts in the road task, which also showed much more individual variability. A subgroup, dubbed 'Flippers', consistently answered far-side absolute road trials from the stick figure's viewpoint rather than their own.
Methodology
Experienced ultimate frisbee players completed two versions of a speeded task online. In one, a stick figure stood at a road intersection and a prompt such as 'Go Home' or 'Go Left' asked which way it should go; in the other, the same logic applied to calling a defensive 'force' on a frisbee field (home/away versus forehand/backhand). The stick figure faced either away from or toward the participant, so relative and absolute answers could not be predicted from each other. The pre-registered test was whether each person's speed advantage for one reference frame correlated across the two tasks.
Limitations
The sample was a specialised group of frisbee players tested on a computer screen, so the 'large-scale' tasks may really have tapped small-scale spatial processing, as the authors acknowledge. Many exploratory findings (the Flippers, stated-preference effects) were not pre-registered and the authors decline to interpret some. Stated preference counts are reported inconsistently between the Results and Discussion. Real navigation or live play, with realistic scenes, might change which frames people use.
How this study connects
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