Cognitive components of path integration: Implications for simulator studies of human navigation

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).