Wayfinding and Spatial Reorientation by Nova Scotia Deer Hunters

Spatial Disorientation and Reorientation

Despite the substantial research literature on spatial cognition, it has been only relatively recently that researchers have actually investigated the phenomenon of being spatially disoriented, especially in real-world (i.e., nonlaboratory) environments (Cornell & Hill, 2006; Heth & Cornell, 1998; Hill, 1992; Koester, 2008; Montello, 1998). Although the topic of being spatially disoriented had been discussed very early in psychological writings (Binet, 1894; Forde, 1873), the first actual study of lost people was apparently conducted by Syrotuck (1977) and published in a monograph intended primarily for search and rescue (SAR) responders. A lost person in this context is someone who is the target of a rural or wilderness search conducted by SAR personnel in an official police action. Hill (1997) defined spatial disorientation as “being unable to identify one’s present location with respect to locations that one knows, and having no effective means or methods for reorienting oneself (p. 1).” Montello (1998), who preferred the phrase “geographical disorientation” to “lost”; to wit: Disoriented people are “uncertain about where they are or where they need to go to get to some destination (p. 3).” For this study, as described in the following, lost was operationally defined as being “turned around such that it took you [the respondent] at least 30 minutes to regain your bearings.”

A major goal of this research was to investigate the manner in which spatially disoriented individuals attempt to recover their orientation in a forested environment, that is, to become “found,” without using navigation aids such as map, compass, or global positioning system (GPS). Unfortunately, although there are a number of personal anecdotes reported in the popular literature by people who had survived the experience of being lost (Fendler, 1978; Gonzales, 2001; Jonsson, 2002), there has been very little research published on the manner in which lost persons attempt to recover their orientation. Most of the studies to date have focused on the distances lost persons of various categories (e.g., hikers, hunters, anglers) had traveled from the place where they were last known to be (Hill, 1992; Koester, 2008; Syrotuck, 1977), whether the person had traveled uphill or downhill (Syrotuck, 1977), or the angle of dispersion between the lost person’s intended goal of travel and the location where they were actually found (Heth & Cornell, 1998). In his archival study of lost person reports submitted by various SAR agencies around the world, Koester (2008) reported that the three most common lost person behaviors are staying put; walking on a road, trail, or other “travel aid”; or simply wandering, respectively. Although these may be important considerations for SAR responders tasked with locating lost people, they do not address the specific motivations and other psychological factors that contribute to how lost persons end up where they do. One exception is the survey study conducted by Montello (1998), who asked respondents to consider “the one episode in your entire life when you were the most severely lost that you can remember (p. 5).” He found a wide range of responses to the experience, such as to continue moving, asking someone for directions, backtracking, and merely staying put. Unfortunately, he did not elaborate on the reorientation attempts made by his respondents in reaction to specific types of disorientation experiences, including the environments where such experiences occurred. As stated earlier, the present study focused on the reorientation attempts made by individuals who were severely disoriented in the forest.

A Multimethod Approach

Research on spatial disorientation poses special challenges to the behavioral scientist, as a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies whenever we attempt to study a truly lost person. For example, we cannot proceed to disorient our experimental participants in the woods and secretly follow them around while observing their behavior, even if that were ethically acceptable. For a study to be ecologically valid, a lost person must be seriously disoriented and concerned for his or her safety, unaccompanied by a clipboard-toting researcher. Rather, the study of lost person behavior would seem to require what Campbell and Fiske (1959) described as a “multimethod” approach, converging on the phenomenon from various research directions. Toward this end, the research directions taken in this research included (a) a summary review of advice by purported wayfinding experts on how best to reorient oneself on becoming lost and (b) analysis of self-reports of individuals who engage in challenging navigational tasks in the wild, including a look at how well their own reorientation strategies compare with those prescribed by experts. We examine first the advice on spatial reorientation and then turn to a discussion of the wayfinding behavior of one particular forest navigator, the recreational deer hunter.

Reorientation Strategies

To develop hypotheses about how lost people will try to reorient themselves, we reviewed the popular literature directed at wilderness hikers, orienteers, anglers, hunters, trackers, and other backcountry enthusiasts, authored by apparently knowledgeable outdoor leaders, guides, and survival instructors. Indeed, we discovered no shortage of advice on how best to react to becoming lost. Most authors recommended several tactics, depending on the specifics of the lost person’s situation, and we found a considerable lack of agreement among authors regarding the best method of refinding the way. Following is a compilation of the various reorientation strategies this literature provided. In an attempt to make the list more exhaustive, we have included those strategies that the experts claim (from their experience) do not work.

The Deer Hunter

Outdoor travel by people of the non-Aboriginal societies of the world will rarely be as challenging as that described earlier. One activity that does require considerable navigation skill is recreational hunting, which continues to be popular in North America, especially in the midwestern United States (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2004) and all Canadian provinces (DuWors et al., 1999). Deer hunting in particular has received some attention by researchers who were interested in the behavior of persons who are spatially disoriented or lost, as actuarial data reveal that approximately 40% of police searches for persons missing in forested or wilderness areas involve lost deer hunters (almost all of whom are men; Hill, 1992; Syrotuck, 1977). It has been proposed that the act of pursuing deer, which tend to inhabit relatively dense forested areas, requires hunters to simultaneously engage in two effortful cognitive processes, that is, continuously updating their spatial location while moving around in the forest and searching for subtle traces of game (Hill, 1992). Contributing to these difficult wayfinding conditions is the fact that hunting normally occurs away from trails and other navigational aids (Heth & Cornell, 1998). As with the walrus hunters of Baffin Island, deer hunters will inevitably experience moments in which they lose track of their current position, requiring some method of reorientation, such as relying on one’s sense of direction, knowledge of the surrounding landscape, memory of travel (Cornell & Heth, 2003), or simple reliance on technological devices, such as map, compass, and/or GPS. Although the percentage of deer hunters who actually become spatially disoriented is not known, the relatively high number of those who become subjects of missing person searches suggests that hunters may vary considerably in their mastery of navigation skills.

The Current Research

In this study, we asked Nova Scotia deer hunters to indicate their preferences for various methods of spatial reorientation that have been recommended by the authors of popular literature on backcountry navigation. A simple tally of the recommendations revealed that the most common advice was simply to “stay put,” followed by “try to retrace your steps,” and “climb a hill or tree for a better view,” respectively. Therefore, we hypothesized that hunters in our sample would express reorientation preferences in that order. We also expected that the less frequently recommended (and sometimes specifically not recommended) options, such as “travel downhill” or “follow the path of least resistance” would be similarly less favored by our sample.

Regarding our review of this literature, we noted a wide variation in the types of advice rendered. Some recommendations seem to appeal to the individual’s navigational skill (e.g., use directional indicators to become reoriented), whereas others seem to provide relatively simple heuristics for finding one’s way to safety (e.g., follow a stream to civilization). We expected from this variation and apparent clustering of types of strategies that there would be some underlying dimensional structure in our respondents’ preferences for the various strategies, which could be revealed by a factor analysis.

Finally, we asked our respondents to indicate the number of times that they had actually been lost while hunting, toward investigating whether such experiences had any association with any of the various reorientation strategies. We made no predictions in this exploratory part of the study.

Method

Results

Reorientation strategies

A repeated-measures, one-way ANOVA was conducted on the 10 reorientation strategies listed in the Lost in the Woods questionnaire (including the “stay put” option). This analysis yielded a highly significant result, F(9, 1017) = 235.51, p < .001, η p 2 = .42. Post hoc comparisons of means (see Table 1) indicated that “stay put” was rated significantly more probable than all other options, whereas “travel random directions” was rated significantly the lowest. Hypotheses were mostly supported, including the preference for the strategy of “climbing a hill or tree for a better view,” although the recommendation to “try to retrace your steps” was ranked significantly lower than some other strategies, despite its popularity with the experts. Apart from this exception, there was reasonable agreement between the sample and the experts on how best to reestablish one’s orientation on becoming lost.

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Table 1.

Summary of Ms, SDs, and Post Hoc Comparisons for Items in the Lost in the Woods Questionnaire

Item	M	SD
1. Try to make shelter for the night, intending to walk out in the morning	1.87	1.26
2. Climb a hill or tree and try to get a better view of the area	2.71cf	1.90
3. Travel what seems to be the best direction after examining the sun or other directional indicators	3.12cf	1.91
4. Using a clearly identifiable location as a “base,” such as a large tree or outcropping, travel in one direction for a while while keeping the base in view, then returning to the base and changing direction, then traveling in that direction for a while, and so on, until I spotted a road or trail or someplace familiar	4.20a	2.03
5. Find the stream I crossed and follow it to civilization	4.27ae	2.12
6. Try to walk in a straight line until I came out of the woods	4.90bde	2.01
7. Try to follow my own tracks out of the woods	4.98bde	2.19
8. Travel downhill until I came to a road or trail	5.01bde	1.66
9. Travel along the “path of least resistance,” wherever it takes me	5.95	1.52
10. Travel in one director for a while, then change direction, then travel in that direction for a while, and so on, until I came out of the woods	6.45	1.26

Note: Lower means indicate higher self-reports in response to the phrase, “What you would likely do in this situation?” Ratings varied from 1 (highly probable) to 7 (highly improbable). Means not sharing a common subscript differ significantly according to Fisher’s least significant difference test, p < .05.

To determine whether the various strategies contained in the Lost in the Woods questionnaire had an underlying factor structure, we conducted a principal components analysis on nine of the strategies, omitting the “stay put” option (which was rated highly by all participants as a last resort), using a varimax rotation. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was .613, indicating that factorability of the data was at least adequate (Kaiser, 1958). Four factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 were found, accounting for 66% of the total variance (see Table 2). Factor 1 had loadings above .40 for “travel a straight line,” “backtrack,” and “travel best direction.” Because these strategies would seem to require the application of wayfinding knowledge beyond a novice level, we labeled it as “skill based.” Factor 2 had loadings for “travel least resistance” and “travel random directions”; we labeled it accordingly as “wandering.” Factor 3 had loadings for “follow stream” and “travel downhill,” so a label of “downhill” seemed appropriate. Finally, Factor 4 had loadings for “climb up” and “direction sampling.” We labeled this factor “perception based,” as these tactics seem to involve an attempt to reestablish one’s orientation by improving visual access (Lynch, 1960).

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Table 2.

Factor Loadings for Principal Components Analysis With Varimax Rotation of the Lost in the Woods Questionnaire

Item	Skill based	Wandering	Downhill	Perception based
1. Follow stream	.27	−.07	.80	−.01
2. Travel downhill	−.01	.21	.86	.03
3. Climb up	−.13	−.16	.04	.80
4. Straight line	.73	.11	.01	−.06
5. Backtrack	.67	.06	.05	.22
6. Best direction	.70	.01	.27	−.04
7. Least resistance	.25	.78	.14	−.12
8. Random directions	−.04	.88	.01	.10
9. Direction sampling	.29	.20	−.03	.70

Note: Full descriptions of items are contained in Table 1 and in the online appendix. Factor loadings > .40 are in boldface.

Discussion

We began this investigation with questions about how backcountry travelers manage to find their way under difficult navigational conditions and how they might respond to becoming spatially disoriented. We selected recreational deer hunters as our participants because of the wayfinding challenge their activity poses. In our survey of hunters in Nova Scotia, a heavily forested Canadian province that has been described as “the lost person capitol of North America” (Beeby, 2001; Clugston, 2002), we found indeed that a large majority of the hunters had experienced spatial disorientation while pursuing their sport, some in fact many times. Similar to the Inuit walrus hunters of the Arctic, becoming temporarily disoriented while hunting deer cannot always be avoided. More important, the hunter—as with any outdoor enthusiast who enters the backcountry—requires an effective plan or strategy for recovering his or her orientation and not becoming even more seriously lost.

What is the source of the strategies that hunters intend to use for reorientation? We surmised that one likely source is the popular literature directed specifically at the backcountry traveler. In our review of the advice proffered by the authors of books and magazine articles on wilderness travel, we found that the most frequent recommendation on becoming turned around was simply to “stay put,” followed by “try to retrace your steps” and “climb a hill or tree for a better view of the land.” Our hypothesis that our sample of hunters would favor the same strategies was only partially supported, in that “try to retrace your steps” was rated significantly lower than the relatively popular strategy of using directional indicators (such as the sun) to find one’s way to safety. However, our sample agreed with the experts that traveling random directions is definitely not a good idea; this option was rated much lower than all other strategies.

It is interesting to compare these results with those of Koester’s (2008) analysis of the outcome of SAR incidents, in which “stayed put” was the subject behavior most frequently recorded, but “wandered” was also common. (Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing from Koester’s data how many lost people first wandered—or indeed tried other strategies—before deciding to stay put.) The types of outdoor activities that these lost persons had been pursuing is not specified by Koester, but it is appropriate to wonder how much disconnect there may be between what our deer hunters report they would do if they become disoriented in the woods and how they would actually respond to becoming seriously lost, having to resort to their own devices for getting found. This question of course is relevant to our earlier discussion of the difficulties we encounter when attempting to study lost person behavior.

Our finding that history of being lost was positively correlated with just one of the reorientation strategies, “try to travel a straight line out of the woods,” raises the question of the relative effectiveness of the various reorientation methods—a question that this study was not designed to address. Direction of causality, of course, is an issue with correlations, but it is interesting to wonder whether the hunters who have been lost in the past have learned through their own experience that walking a straight line is an effective way to become “unlost” or, conversely, that these unlucky wayfinders have attempted to use an ineffective reorientation method, perhaps one that contributed to their becoming significantly turned around in the first place. However, the overall popularity of the “walk a straight line” option—even by hunters reporting few or no occasions of ever having been lost—leads us to favor the first interpretation. On the other hand, we hesitate to recommend this option as an “all-purpose” strategy on becoming disoriented in the wild. Environmental factors will be critical in determining how effective traveling a straight line will be—as indeed is the case for all the recommended strategies. For example, trying to travel a straight line in a large and remote wilderness area, many miles from roads or signs of civilization, can be disastrous for the lost person. Future research on the relative effectiveness of various methods of reorientation will need to consider as well possible mediating effects of environmental variables, such as terrain, topography, vegetation, climate, and relative isolation.

Principal components analysis of the 10 reorientation strategies led to four interpretable factors, labeled “skill based,” “wandering,” “downhill,” and “perception based.” The two strategies loading on the latter factor—“Climb a hill or tree for a better view” and “Sample various directions away from a specific, identifiable location, while looking for something familiar”—were highly recommended by several of the experts whom we reviewed. We labeled the factor as perception based because both strategies seem to involve a visual search for reorientation by improving visual access to distal stimuli useful for wayfinding (Lynch, 1960). This perception-based approach seems similar to that used by the master Puluwat navigators described by Gladwin (1970), when their canoes are blown miles off-route by the daily summer storms. Under these circumstances, the spatially disoriented navigator’s training prescribes sailing in one direction while looking for any of the hundreds of high reefs or mountainous islands that he or she can visibly recognize from a distance. Once recognition occurs, the navigator is able to reestablish his position and continue his journey. Indeed, as Gladwin observed, the navigator’s training provides solutions for every possible contingency, including emergency procedures. Perhaps a lesson we can learn from such cultures in which long-range travel under challenging wayfinding conditions is necessary is that the ability to spatially reorient oneself is just as important as “knowing the way”—that spatial reorientation is just one component of wayfinding skill.