Thanks for this — it will inform a class I sometimes teach.
Fascinating!
We’ve gotten to rely on GPS (well, phone-based nav, which sometimes involves GPS) a lot . We’ll drive somewhere and my sense of where we are, and where we are going (north/south, relation to other places we go) is completely gone.
In addition to the “drive past your destination” or “go the wrong way and make a U-turn”, our car’s built-in nav system has been rather hilariously wrong.
– Driving home from visiting our son at college, it was convinced we were in the middle of a field. We were, in fact, on a road.
– Similarly, driving through a town in New York, it thought we were in Lake George. The lake. The car has some fancy equipment on it, but it is not equipped with pontoons.
A friend suggested that as both of those were around twilight, and there were hills / mountains around Lake George, that may have blocked the line-of-sight to the GPS satellites. Nonetheless, I now strongly prefer to attach my phone and use the Android Auto function.
Without reading the article, from that excerpt it’s entirely possible they got cause and effect backwards.
Even totally pre- the advent of GPS consumer navigators some people couldn’t navigate worth shit. Others hardly need a map to find their way around unfamiliar surroundings. There’s an aptitude for navigation that includes paying attention to implicit landmarks, constant awareness of direction, and detailed 3D memory.
I have no doubt that use of navigators blunts whatever skill one may have. But my expectation is that people lacking navigation aptitude will rely on navigators far more than people with high navigational aptitude.
So of course the heaviest users can’t navigate without one. But not due to being crippled by using one, but rather by having chosen to be a heavy user because they’re lost otherwise due to lack of aptitude.
You might want to read the article. I came on it through Nature News, which isn’t much into poorly reported pop science.
The abstract from the study says:
I’m not sure it’s entirely convincing, but they at least addressed that point.
Thank you. I now have. It was lazy of me to comment without taking note of the source. You’re right of course; the research was more careful than that.
And I learned of a new website to waste spend time on.
As the famous baseball announcer Jack Buck used to say …
That’s a winner.
We should all just be happy we’re not in one of the countries bordering Israel right now:
Similar problems are snarling package delivery and the local equivalent of Uber in Moscow. And making a hash of what little Russian airline operations remain.
The government’s efforts to jam GPS and the other positioning systems as an anti-drone-attack measure are making a mess of their own people’s use of those systems.
It makes sense, tho, to have those priorities, doesn’t it? I mean, people get lost because their nav system isn’t working, or the enemy’s missiles can more accurately reach their targets.
It’s not an unreasonable decision.
But how many Ukrainian drones approach Moscow on any given day versus how many other things, including police responses, are bolixed up because they’ve built their infrastructure to depend on GNSS (the generic term for the collective nav systems of several nations that are akin to the USA’s GPS)?
Especially given that the drones that can reach Moscow are not very potent, essentially the air defense authorities are antagonizing all their own residents every day in exchange for avoiding pinprick inconveniences to just a few once a month. Yes, and maybe a death or wounding or two, but if the ambulance service is all snafu-ed by the jamming, they may well be indirectly killing more Muscovites that way than they’re saving from drones.
The gray area of [not peace but not full bore war either] has lots of weird little pockets and eddies. This is but one.
Makes sense to me. I’m old enough to remember pre-GPS days, and I have a horrible sense of direction. I have been known to get lost in a small area (college campus) with a map in my hand. I’m someone who considers GPS a godsend.
My husband did much better than I did before GPS and I see no evidence his unaided navigation is not as good as ever.
Just before Smartphones became available my wife transferred from one division at her workplace to another and the new duties included visiting people in their homes. She hated that aspect of her new job, but loved everything else, and asked me to help her find a GPS for her car. I tried to delay the purchase, arguing that it wouldn’t be long until cell-phones had GPS functions and Kindle readers had phone functions and so on. But she got lost a couple times and called me at work to help her with directions and I’d talk her through left- right- right- turns while reading them off Mapquest. After she interrupted a couple important meetings to get directions, I gave in and bought her a Garmin nuvi$ for Christmas.
Her parents were visiting us in California for Christmas that year and they were pretty impressed by the clear voice and well-in-advance instructions when we used the GPS to visit a few places out of town. So, a couple Christmases later, we got a GPS for them. They thanked us for it but never said much about it afterward.
We visited them again a couple years later and, when we were traveling to some tourist destination in Denver, asked them why they didn’t use the GPS.
“It’s broken.” they told us, but didn’t explain any further.
A couple more years later we were visiting my wife’s mother (Dad had passed by then) in the summer and decided to go visit the Cherry Creek reservoir. Mom had me drive because we were trying to decide whether or not to buy her car, and I saw the GPS in the car. I asked if I should use it and she said I could but it had a tendency to be wrong. So we drove around Denver trying to find the entrance to the Cherry Creek reservoir and the GPS was giving me directions and Mom was giving me different directions and, ultimately, Mom said, “Oh…well, I guess those people must have taken out their bougainvillea because I haven’t seen it on any of these corners and that’s the corner that you turn on to take the short cut to the back entrance.”
So my wife and I realized (and talked about it later) that the GPS had never been broken; it was just that Mom & Dad knew the short cuts and back routes to a lot of places in Denver and when the GPS would give them instructions that didn’t match their habits (some of which were not shorter and not faster but were certainly less stressful to aging drivers) even after they downloaded and installed map updates, they learned to just assume “It’s wrong; it’s broken.” and eventually stopped using it.
Meanwhile my wife, having quickly learned to dig into the options on her GPS#, figured out how to set it to avoid freeways. Since the people she had to visit for her job were all relatively close to her office, she didn’t really need to use freeways and since she hates driving on freeways she doesn’t miss the few minutes they might save in getting her to a customer’s place.
But that bit us in the @$$ when we took her little gadget on trips. We would take it in her luggage and connect it to any car we rented so we could avoid getting lost in an unfamiliar place while also avoiding the ridiculous cost of a rental GPS unit. However, one does not get from Denver International Airport to the South Denver suburbs very easily by surface streets% alone.
Even more irritating was our vacation in Hawaii: I checked Google Maps to plan a route from our Hilo hotel to the dock in Kona for the snorkeling tour company where we had reserved two seats. My wife had lived in Hilo for ten years while going to college (and for a while before and after) so she knew how to get around the island and said, “You don’t have to look it up. I’ve been there dozens of times. We’ll just take the highway north around the perimeter and it’ll be easy to find 'cause it’s on the water front.”
It’s a good thing I checked anyway. The perimeter highway was blocked along the northern rim of the island. I thought it was due to the wildfires (which were mostly on Maui but there had been a small flare-up on the Big Island around the time our plane was landing) but it wasn’t. We learned the next day (while trying to drive north to get back to Hilo) that a major volcanic flow (which we had ignored during our dating years because, by then, she was on the Mainland and didn’t need to be concerned about such things) had basically oozed across the northern highway and there were basically no efforts to restore the road since that time.
So we ended up planning a route using the east-west highway over The Saddle. It looked pretty easy: just get on at the eastern T-section near the high school and follow it west up the hills and down to the other coast. I set the end-points in Google Maps on my phone and my wife set the end-points in WAZE on her phone. Our reservation was for the morning excursion so we were going to have to get up well before sunrise to make the trip, but the part she hates about highways and freeways is the congestion so that suited my wife just fine because very few people are on the road in the wee hours after bars close and before sunrise. We got up and hit the road around 3:30AM to drive through the pouring rain following the WAZE instructions on her phone to turn here and go there and turn there – and double back, and try to avoid the tricycle, and watch out for that goat and – “Hey wait a minute!” I protested after an hour of hopping from one housing tract to another, “Why are we driving in this neighborhood anyway? I thought we agreed we would take the highway.”
“Ohh…” she realized, “I must still have the ‘avoid freeways’ setting on this App, as well!”
“Sweety,” I struggled to keep my voice level, “at this rate we’ll get to the harbor in eight days and we only have six until our plane to LAX. More importantly, and the snorkel boat leaves in four hours and they don’t give refunds.”
So we stopped in front of some stranger’s house and she fiddled with her phone and the WAZE app and we got back on the highway and finished the trip – arriving with fifteen minutes to spare before check-in time.
—G!
$It was fun giving her a bunch of clues all over the house and including a note with that gift that said, “You’re running around like you’re lost. Maybe this will help!”
#It was also fun recording my own vocal collection and pre-selecting it for the narration. I recorded the instructions like a panicky hysterical man. I think she found an alternate voice within a week.
%Actually, the first time we took her GPS to Denver was worse: There are no toll roads in Ventura County, so she had no need select the Avoid Toll Roads option for her business-related driving. When we drove from the DIA Enterprise lot to Mom’s house the first time, I literally did a rubber-neck twist while saying, “Wait–what did that sign just say?” and the bill came three weeks later.