Keep your eye on those mountains if you don't want to end up walking in circles
Ever found yourself unintentionally back where you started when out for a walk?
You’re not alone: researchers in Germany have found a propensity in walkers to walk in circles rather than in a straight line. Unless they had a reliable reference point – the sun or another visual cue, their subjects took circular routes.
The observations were made on walkers being tracked by Global Positioning System devices in the Bienwald forest in Germany and the Tunisian Sahara.
The results of the study by the Multisensory Perception and Action Group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany were published in Current Biology. Doctors Jan Souman and Marc Ernst led the research.
Dr Souman said: “One explanation offered in the past for walking in circles is that most people have one leg longer or stronger than the other, which would produce a systematic bias in one direction.
“To test this explanation, we instructed people to walk straight while blindfolded, thus removing the effects of vision. Most of the participants in the study walked in circles, sometimes in extremely small ones – diameter less than 20m.”
But the walkers in the study didn’t veer in the same direction; rather they teetered randomly to the left or right.
Dr Souman said: “Small random errors in the various sensory signals that provide information about walking direction add up over time, making what a person perceives to be straight ahead drift away from the true straight ahead direction.”
Dr Ernst, group leader at the MPI for biological cybernetics, added: “The results from these experiments show that even though people may be convinced that they are walking in a straight line, their perception is not always reliable.
“Additional, more cognitive, strategies are necessary to really walk in a straight line. People need to use reliable cues for walking direction in their environment, for example a tower or mountain in the distance, or the position of the sun.”
The doctors plan further research into the subject looking at how people use these and various other sources of information to guide their walking direction. An omindirctional treadmill will be used, along with virtual reality equipment, giving participants the illusion of walking through a forest.
In the meantime, grough readers should keep an eye on those mountains if they don’t want to end up walking in circles. Unless of course they actually want to end up back where they started.
