Chicks’ use of geometrical and nongeometrical information in environments of different sizes

Excerpt

Spatial reorientation refers to the strategies involved in finding one’s bearing after disorientation. To remember a spatial location there are two basic systems: an externally referenced system, that associates a location to the characteristics of the external environment using distance and directions from landmarks, and a self-referenced system, such as path integration, that associates a location to the position of the self, compensating for self movements by encoding the distance and angular variation (direction) of that movement. When the two systems are not in agreement, for instance as a result of movement not controlled by the animal itself and in the absence of orienting visual cues, the externally referenced system is usually used to correct the self-referenced system. This reorientation ability has been extensively investigated in these last years, both in comparative and developmental perspective. It has been shown that there are two main sources of information that an animal can take into account in order to reorient, namely the metric arrangement of the surfaces defining an enclosure (geometric information) and the discrete elements or landmarks located inside or outside such space (nongeometric information). …