Researchers from Italy and the United States found out that the human brain is inclined to build more rectilinear routes, and not calculate the shortest path. Dedicated to the human brain navigation mechanism. Article of scientists was published in the Nature Computational Science magazine.
Specialists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) acquired an anonymized array of GPS signals from the phones of people walking in Boston, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and San Francisco. Together with a colleague from the Turin Polytechnic University, they analyzed more than 550 thousand routes traveled by more than 14 thousand people per year.
Instead of choosing the shortest path, pedestrians chose a little longer routes, but with a minimum angular deviation from the target. In other words, people build routes that allow them to be face to the end point of their path. It was true for both Boston and Cambridges with their winding streets and San Francisco with its grid layout. The larger the distance to the ultimate goal, the bigger was the deviation from the shortest route – on the way to one kilometer, the difference was eight percent. It also turned out that the return paths of pedestrians differed from the initial.
previously conducted studies of animal behavior and brain activity indicate that a person defines its route by calculating vectors. Such behavior, researchers believe, developed so that the brain can allocate more “computing power” for other tasks. “Vector navigation allows you to get the wrong way, but close enough to him. In addition, it is very easy to calculate,” said one of the researchers, Professor Mit Carlo Ratti.