Getting around: making fast and frugal navigation decisions.

The spatial environments in which humans and animals navigate tend to be complex and dynamic, and are often characterized by information shortage. Getting around is a fundamental, adaptive problem for many individuals, but one they are capable of solving with remarkable speed and accuracy. In this chapter, it is argued that what on occasion appears to be a complex behavior based on internal representations is often the outcome of simple mechanisms - termed fast and frugal heuristics - and their interaction with the environment. Thus, the spatial navigation decisions made by individuals can be characterized as "good enough" rather than optimal, and are often crucially dependent on the environments in which they operate. This chapter reviews approaches from navigation research that differ in their emphasis on environment versus internal spatial representations in explaining movement behavior and offers an explanation of human movement behavior in terms of relatively simple mechanisms that can exploit properties of the task environment. The main contention put forward here is that a large part of explanatory power would be lost by focusing merely on the underlying cognitive processes without reference to the structure of the environment(s) in which those processes operate.