Welcome To Tanelorn: Why Travelers Go South: North Seems Uphill

Friday, July 2, 2010

Why Travelers Go South: North Seems Uphill

Why
Travelers Go South: North Seems Uphill

via Wired: Wired Science by Bruce
Bower, Science News on 6/14/10

People making travel plans may unwittingly heed a strange rule of thumb —
southern routes rule. In a new experiment, volunteers chose paths that dipped
south over routes of the same distance that arched northward, perhaps because
northern routes intuitively seem uphill and thus more difficult, researchers
suggest.

Volunteers also estimated that it would take
considerably longer to drive between the same pairs of U.S. cities if traveling
from south to north, as opposed to north to south, says psychologist and study
director Tad Brunyé of the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering
Command in Natick, Mass., and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. For journeys
that averaged 798 miles, time estimates for north-going jaunts averaged one hour
and 39 minutes more than south-going trips, he and his colleagues report in an
upcoming Memory & Cognition.

“This finding suggests that when people plan to travel across long distances,
a ‘north is up’ heuristic might compromise their accuracy in estimating trip
durations,” Brunyé says.

Only individuals who adopted a first-person, ground-level perspective treated
southern routes as the paths of least resistance, he notes. From this vantage,
one moves forward and back, right and left.

No southern leaning characterized those who assessed routes from a bird’s-eye
view. This type of navigation uses the directional terms north, south, east and
west.

Real-world experiences underlie avoidance of northern routes, Brunyé
proposes. Young children learn that as objects and locations get higher, they
become harder to attain. Examples include reaching for a toy on the counter,
climbing the stairs and jumping.

An ingrained notion that “up is difficult” then gets applied to other
situations. When someone imagines traversing a northern and a southern path, the
northern way feels higher and more physically demanding, Brunyé suggests.

Another phenomenon might account for the new findings, remarks psychologist
Stella Lourenco of Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved in the
study. From infancy on, people categorize different quantities — say, the
numbers 2 and 4 or a big and a small object — as instances of “less than” and
“more than.” Also, adults tend to associate larger numbers with “up” and smaller
numbers with “down.”

If volunteers equated a northern route’s greater height on a computer screen
with “more than” and a southern route’s lower position as “less than,” that
could explain a southern bias, Lourenco says.

Brunyé’s group first presented 160 college students with a series of maps on
a computer screen showing parts of Pittsburgh or Chicago. Each map contained
icons for various fictional landmarks, including an information booth and subway
stops. Different-colored lines portrayed routes from one landmark to another,
going north to south, east to west, or at angles.

An experimenter asked participants to choose the shorter, faster route to a
destination. Some participants took whatever perspective they wanted; others
were instructed to take a first-person or a bird’s-eye outlook.

Participants who assumed a first-person stance chose southern routes
two-thirds of the time. Most reported no awareness of having favored southern
routes.

Students had no preference for eastern or western routes, or for routes that
angled in any particular direction.

Further experiments ruled out the possibilities that participants favored
left or right turns, perceived northern routes as longer than southern routes or
chose southern routes because they liked information located toward the bottom
of the computer screen.

Instead, participants rated northern routes as potentially more scenic and
requiring more calories to walk or fuel to drive than southern routes — all
signs of perceiving northern routes as elevated, Brunyé suggests.

His team is now examining whether volunteers wearing head-mounted devices
that place them in virtual settings prefer southern over northern routes.

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