Certain perceptual and cognitive aspects of navigation involved in remote-control situations were investigated. Special reference is made to the way an operator converts visual flow transformations seen on a graphic display into egocentric "route knowledge", and then attributes this information to a path on the map. Another question was whether the non-correspondence between these two modes of spatial information presentation (that is to say misalignment) plays a role in this process. Two types of navigational problems were dealt with: direct answering (that is to say route memory from origin to destination) and reverse answering (that is to say route memory from destination to origin). The subjects were found to have difficulties in memorizing the visual flow and in using the perceived information to select the route on the map. The non-correspondence between egocentric and allocentric spatial information significantly influenced the decision time and success rate in direct answering conditions, but no misalignment effects were observed in reverse ones.
Abstract