The many faces of disorientation: a response to Daniel R. Montello

ABSTRACT

Daniel Montello’s commentary on our article “Subjective Disorientation as a Metacognitive Feeling” raises many interesting points. In this response, we hope to show that what might at first seem like strong disagreements are for the most part minor issues and that the disagreements that remain are of the fruitful kind that encourage further discussion and research.

KEYWORDS:

• Disorientation
• phenomenology
• metacognition

Notes

¹ A potential misunderstanding that we need to clarify is that we do not think that the distinction between being lost and being disoriented is a matter of severity, but a matter of objectivity (third person reports) and subjectivity (first person reports). If people do indeed tend to reserve the term lost for severe episodes of disorientation, that would be an interesting empirical finding about the colloquial use of the terms, but not one that relates to our distinction.

² Note however that in our paper we characterize disorientation in terms of confidence, not uncertainty.

³ Even if the case of wandering does not impel us to change our characterization, the strong degree of context-sensitivity exhibited by disorientation might mean that our characterization needs to widen. We find more than enough ground to assert that disorientation is a metacognitive feeling. What precise process disorientation is evaluating and regulating, and the specific mechanisms involved is rather a question to be settled empirically. In the standard case, we believe the evaluated process to be the online system of spatial representation. However, it might be better to talk of disorientation evaluating and regulating active navigational processes broadly understood, because this wider understanding encompasses cases like following a GPS, a guide, being on a plane, etc.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche [ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL,ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog].