Adding insult to injury, the USC doctoral student found himself covered in pollen while doing field work in April and early May. Perhaps most surprising is the fact that Hutcheson is pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology—a discipline not especially known for exposure to the elements.

Hutcheson’s first research project at USC had him and his subjects on the Horseshoe in an unusual experiment on spatial navigation.

“I’m very interested in understanding why people get lost and how they find their way,” Hutcheson said.

Hutcheson and USC psychology professor Gary Allen specifically want to understand how people form virtual pictures in their minds to remember path information. In the experiment, Hutcheson had his subjects don noise-suppressing headphones and ski goggles with the lenses papered over. He then pushed them in a wheelchair to a place on the Sumter Street sidewalk where they could observe a simple arrangement of four numbered safety cones on the Horseshoe.

After studying the positions of the safety cones for about 30 seconds, the subjects pulled the goggles back over their eyes and were pushed in a roundabout path to a large cardboard box that served as a makeshift office. The twists and turns to the small shelter were intended to disorient the subjects and force them to rely on virtual images of the cones rather than working memory.

Once in the cardboard shelter, subjects removed the goggles and studied a laptop with pictures of the safety cones taken from various angles.

A question on the screen would ask such questions as: If you are standing at cone No. 2, is this a correct view of cone No. 4? Or, If you are standing at cone No. 3, is this a correct view of cone No. 1? Because each subject had never actually seen the cones from those angles, they had to “form a virtual picture in their minds to get the answer correct,” Hutcheson said.

How did the subjects do? He’s still analyzing the data but already sees gender differences. Male subjects tended to rely on virtual views of the cones (that is, views they had never actually seen) more effectively than females, Hutcheson said.

“Spatial memory is interesting because it’s so broad in what it involves. We use both working memory and long-term memory in navigation,” Hutcheson said.

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