Choosing efficient actions: Deciding where to walk

Humans evolved to be endurance animals. Our ancestors were persistence hunters; they would chase animals, including gazelles, until they ran them into exhaustion. Put simply, people evolved in an ecological niche that selected for endurance and efficiency of locomotion. To locomote to any destination, one could take countless different paths, each requiring different amounts of energy. Because the ground is typically not flat or homogeneous, the straight direct path is often not the most energetically efficient. For hills below 14°, the direct straight path up the hill is the most energetically efficient. However, for hills above 14°, walkers would minimize their absolute energy expenditure by taking a zigzagged path so that their gradient of ascension is 14° [1]. In three experiments, we assessed the degree to which people make bioenergetically efficient decisions about locomotion through path selection. In Experiment 1, people were immersed into a virtual environment and adjusted the angle of ascension of a virtual path up hills of various gradients so that when taking the path, they would expend the least amount of energy when they reached the top. The second experiment was of a similar design, but was conducted in the real word. In the last experiment, in a virtual environment, participants choose between two paths up hills of various gradient, where these paths varied in the energy required for ascent. Participants made these judgements both before and after motor experience with gradient climbing on an incline trainer. For steep hills, we found that people choose much straighter paths over the bioenergetically optimal zigzagged paths. Motor experience did lead to higher probability for choosing optimal paths for steep hills, but lead to less optimal paths for shallower ones. These results show clearly that individuals show a straight path bias when deciding how to ascend hills.