Impact of age and obstacles on navigation precision and reaction time during blind navigation in dual-task conditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Navigation without vision is a skill that is often employed in our daily lives, such as walking in the dark at night. Navigating without vision to a remembered target has previously been studied. However, little is known about the impact of age or obstacles on the attentional demands of a blind navigation task. This study examined the impacts of age and obstacles on reaction time (RT) and navigation precision during blind navigation in dual-task conditions. The aims were to determine the effects of age, obstacles, and auditory stimulus location on RT and navigation precision in a blind navigation task. Ten healthy young adults (24.5±2.5 years) and ten healthy older adults (69.5±2.9 years) participated in the study. Participants were asked to walk to a target located 8m ahead. In half the trials, the path was obstructed with hanging obstacles. Participants performed this task in the absence of vision, while executing a discrete RT task. Results demonstrated that older adults presented increased RT, linear distance travelled (LDT), and obstacle contact; that obstacle presence significantly increased RT compared to trials with no obstacles; and that an auditory stimulus emitted early versus late in the path increased LDT. Results suggest that the attentional demands of blind navigation are higher in older than young adults, as well as when obstacles are present. Furthermore, navigation precision is affected by age and when participants are distracted by the secondary task early in navigation, presumably because the secondary task interferes with path estimation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".