Human behaviour: Walking in circles

传说中的鬼打墙，最近有研究小组进行了研究，揭示了其中的原因。在光线较弱的情况下，比如黑夜，人倾向于转圈行走，不过半径比较大。如果完全蒙上眼睛，半径只有10m左右。表明人的行动要有参照物，不然就陷进去圈圈了。同样，如果在沙漠里面，只有很少的参照物，也是会迷失方向，造成恐怖的‘鬼打墙’。很有意思的研究。感兴趣的可以根据题目连接进入页面去查看详细信息。



Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Current Biology, 20 August 2009
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.053
Report

Walking Straight into Circles
Jan L. Souman1,,,Ilja Frissen1,2,Manish N. Sreenivasa1,3andMarc O. Ernst1
1 Multisensory Perception and Action Group, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstrae 41, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
2 Multimodal Interaction Lab, McGill University, 3459 Rue McTavish, Montreal, QC H3A 1Y1, Canada
3 Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 7 Avenue du Colonel Roche, 31077 Toulouse, France

Summary
Common belief has it that people who get lost in unfamiliar terrain often end up walking in circles. Although uncorroborated by empirical data, this belief has widely permeated popular culture. Here, we tested the ability of humans to walk on a straight course through unfamiliar terrain in two different environments: a large forest area and the Sahara desert. Walking trajectories of several hours were captured via global positioning system, showing that participants repeatedly walked in circles when they could not see the sun. Conversely, when the sun was visible, participants sometimes veered from a straight course but did not walk in circles. We tested various explanations for this walking behavior by assessing the ability of people to maintain a fixed course while blindfolded. Under these conditions, participants walked in often surprisingly small circles (diameter < 20 m), though rarely in a systematic direction. These results rule out a general explanation in terms of biomechanical asymmetries or other general biases [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Instead, theysuggest that veering from a straight course is the result of accumulating noise in the sensorimotor system, which, without an external directional reference to recalibrate the subjective straight ahead, may cause people to walk in circles.