During a journey to Siberia in 2019, cognitive scientist Pablo Fernandez Velasco participated in a raffle with the Evenki reindeer herders. The prizes ranged from a soccer ball to a GPS unit. Velasco was surprised when one of the herders won the GPS and seemed disappointed by it. This real-life navigation scenario is often overlooked in research, which typically focuses on virtual navigation on computer screens devoid of natural elements like trees and wildlife. This approach assumes that human behavior is consistent across different cultural and environmental settings, but evidence suggests otherwise.
Neuroscientist Hugo Spiers and his team at University College London highlight this discrepancy in an upcoming publication in Royal Society Open Science. They argue that lab findings may not accurately reflect real-world behavior due to the controlled nature of experiments. Environmental anthropologist Helen Davis from Arizona State University emphasizes the importance of field research over lab studies for understanding human navigation.
Date: 2024-10-11 14:00:00
Source: www.sciencenews.org