Not all those who wander are lost: Spatial exploration patterns and their relationship to gender and spatial memory.

When humans and animals navigate through environments, they form spatial memories important for supporting subsequent recall of locations relative to their own position and orientation, as well as to other object locations in the environment. The goal of the current study was to examine whether individual differences in initial exploration of a large-scale novel environment relate to subsequent spatial memories. A majority of studies examining spatial memory formed in large-scale spaces have constrained encoding of the environment by leading participants on pre-determined paths, thereby limiting their free exploration.

Sex Differences in Exploration Behavior and the Relationship to Harm Avoidance.

Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance.

The influence of social context and body size on action judgments for self and others.

Judgments of affordances, the potential actions that an observer can carry out within an environment, require observers to relate information about their body to information in the environment. Although humans can accurately judge affordances for others, it is unknown whether other people's capability to act influences one's own affordance judgments. Based on theoretical accounts and recent empirical evidence highlighting the importance of social information in perception and action, we hypothesized that the action capabilities of another person would influence one's own affordance judgments.

Utilizing topology to generate and test theories of change.

Statistical and methodological innovations in the study of change are advancing rapidly, and visual tools have become an important component in model building and testing. Graphical representations such as path diagrams are necessary, but may be insufficient in the case of complex theories and models. Topology is a visual tool that connects theory and testable equations believed to capture the theorized patterns of change.

Relating spatial perspective taking to the perception of other's affordances: providing a foundation for predicting the future behavior of others.

Understanding what another agent can see relates functionally to the understanding of what they can do. We propose that spatial perspective taking and perceiving other's affordances, while two separate spatial processes, together share the common social function of predicting the behavior of others. Perceiving the action capabilities of others allows for a common understanding of how agents may act together.

Plunging into the pool of death: imagining a dangerous outcome influences distance perception.

We examined whether manipulating the imagined consequences of falling would influence the perception of height, distance, and size. In experiment 1, height and size perception were measured when participants stood at a short height (0.89 m) or a medium height (1.

Follow your heart: Emotion adaptively influences perception.

The current review introduces a new program of research that suggests the perception of spatial layout is influenced by emotions. Though perceptual systems are often described as closed and insulated, this review presents research suggesting that a variety of induced emotions (e.g.