En los ojos de Guliver: información contextual y sentido de orientación / In Gulliver's eyes: contextual information and sense of orientation

Este manuscrito estudia el sentido de orientación de las personas en situaciones en que existe información de tipo contextual, que permite a las personas a ver locaciones muy distantes. Para ello se preguntó a 133 individuos indicar la ubicación de cinco hitos próximos y lejanos de la ciudad de Valparaíso, en 2 situaciones distintas: miradores urbanos y lugares en el medio de la trama urbana en el que la visión de información contextual no es posible. Los resultados mostraron que no existía una asociación entre la Precisión Promedio por Persona y el sexo, edad, o el grado familiaridad, pero que sí con el lugar donde se habían hecho estas estimaciones.

This manuscript examines how people gain a sense of orientation in scenarios where large-scale, contextual information is available. Two locations of the city of Valparaiso where one can see the entire city from the heights were selected for an experiment, as well as two areas in the middle of the urban grid where no large-scale information was available. A total of 133 people were asked to point to five non-visible landmarks in these scenarios and their estimations were compared with the real position of each target. Results showed no association between this value and people's gender, age or familiarity with the neighborhood. However, a positive relationship was found between this value and the places in which estimates were made.

Straight to the point: how people encode linear discontinuations

Spatial discontinuations, as those found in cities and buildings, are everyday events. But, how do we encode and classify such misalignments? This is the topic of this paper. Twenty participants were asked to classify a total of 51 icons showing an upward-moving line being misaligned to the right, left and straight down. The results show that subjects were very sensitive to slight discontinuations occurring to vertical lines and that there was not exact symmetry between the left and right axis, meaning that the pieces slightly misaligned to the left were encoded differently than those misaligned to the right.