[accessibleimage] Re: Navigation and a couple of questions

Hi,
I sent a question to Prof. Moser director of lab at NTNU and one of the
authors of the paper about this and he sent a reply.


My question:

In an article about Esref Armagan, a blind artist, in  New Science,
January 27, 2005, Dr. John Kennedy states that  "The geometry of 
direction is common to vision and touch." and "knowledge about
perspective, he [Kennedy] has come to believe, is acquired in similar ways
for both [blind, sighted persons]" and "Where a sighted person looks out,
a blind person reaches out, and they will discover the
same things" 

My question is would not the findings of Dr. Francesca Sargolini et.al.
help explain this?

Prof. Moser answer

Yes, to some extent they would. The grid cells are independent of whether
the animals see or not; they are hard-wired and all that is necessary to
make them fire is the animal's (person's) own motion (the brain is
calculating position based on how far and in what direction the animal is
moving). The role of vision is to calibrate the grid map, aligning the
peaks
of the grid with the landmarks (features) of the particular environment,
but this can be done with stimuli from other sensory modalities too.

Regards,
Lisa

P.S  In my question I wrote "help explain this" that perhaps was not the
best wording because I am sure Dr. Kennedy has explained it very well.
Perhaps should have written "additional information that explains".





Lisa Yayla
Huseby Kompetansesenter 
Oslo Norway
lisa.yayla@xxxxxxxxxx

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