Navigating Mazes: Local and Global Probabilities

Sixuan Chen has just had accepted at the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology her manuscript on the use of statistical structure in maze navigation. This is a condensed and improved account of work detailed in her masters' thesis. Sixuan's work builds on other work from the lab in which we tried to determine whether people have distinct probabilistic representations for various aspects of their environments. Sixuan was interested in spatial behavior and so designed an experiment where mazes were built programmatically. She could manipulate the reliability of local cues and the consistency of the location of the maze goal's, thus having a "local" and "global" probability. She demonstrated that both probabilistic structures independently affected participant choices, but that there was a strong bias to the use of local information even when that policy was sub-optimal.

Here is a pre-print ¹ version of the manuscript. I will update the post when the pretty version becomes available.