Sense of direction is the ability to know one's location and perform

wayfinding Wayfinding (or way-finding) encompasses all of the ways in which people (and animals) orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. Wayfinding software is a self-service computer program that helps users to find a location, ...

. It is related to

cognitive map A cognitive map is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment. T ...

spatial awareness Spatial contextual awareness consociates contextual information such as an individual's or sensor's location, activity, the time of day, and proximity to other people or objects and devices.Chen, Guanling, and David Kotz. 2000. A Survey of Context- ...

, and

spatial cognition Spatial cognition is the acquisition, organization, utilization, and revision of knowledge about spatial environments. It is most about how animals including humans behave within space and the knowledge they built around it, rather than space itse ...

. Sense of direction can be impaired by brain damage, such as in the case of

topographical disorientation Topographical disorientation is the inability to orient oneself in one's surroundings, sometimes as a result of focal brain damage. This disability may result from the inability to make use of selective spatial information (e.g., environmental l ...

. Humans create spatial maps whenever they go somewhere. Neurons called place cells inside the

hippocampus The hippocampus (via Latin from Greek , 'seahorse') is a major component of the brain of humans and other vertebrates. Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, a ...

fire individually while a person makes their way through an environment. This was first discovered in rats, when the neurons of the hippocampus were recorded. Certain neurons fired whenever the rat was in a certain area of its environment. These neurons form a grid when they are all put together on the same plane.

Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction Scale

Sense of direction can be measured with the Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction Scale, a self-assessed psychometric test designed in 2002. This scale has been used to study sense of direction in many contexts, such as driving.

References

Cognitive psychology Behavioural sciences Spatial cognition {{Neuroscience-stub

Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction Scale

See also

References